


What We Are

by Evilpixie



Series: DC Omegaverse [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Broken Families, Dominance, Drug Use, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Fame, Family Drama, Friends to Lovers, Gossip Media, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, No Strings Attached, Pack Bonding, Pack Dynamics, Pack Family, Past Bruce/Selina, Past Relationship(s), Prequel, Submission, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-06 04:16:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 59,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1844086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilpixie/pseuds/Evilpixie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Bruce is a closeted omega and Clark the unsuspecting alpha. But some secrets just can't stay hidden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [What We Are-吾辈本如斯](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4895953) by [Forth_East](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Forth_East/pseuds/Forth_East)



> This story is set in the 'Omega Verse' or omegaverse. If you are unfamiliar with the concept please have a quick peek at [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/403644/chapters/665489) prior to reading. It really set me straight in terms of this whole thing. Also note that I have taken a few liberties with the trope. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to throw them my way.
> 
> Also, this story is part of a series and though it is listed as the first story was not written as such. Feel free, if you are a new reader, to skip to some of the later stories and read at your leisure. I have tried to write each segment of this series so it is assessable to new readers.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Translation also available here: [吾辈本如斯](http://tieba.baidu.com/p/3961271565)

It hit him like a wall.

 

Bruce’s knees thudded into the concrete floor, his hands followed, and body heaved forward; sides shuddering through a violent clench of muscle and insides knotting with desperate need.

 

“No…” he rasped. “No…” his heat wasn’t due for another twenty seven hours. He was well ahead of the danger zone and hadn’t yet exhibited any of the necessary precursors to the inevitable peak in his cycle. This shouldn’t be happening. This didn’t make sense. This…

 

His confusion withered and died as he stared at his hand, at a bloody puncture in the hybrid fabric of his uniform, and the snapped shaft of one of Poison Ivy’s thorns protruding from his skin. With sickening dread he pulled his trembling hand up to his mouth, bit into the base of the hooked green barb, and drew it from his body. The toxic taste of the thorn prickled sickeningly sweet on the edge of his tongue.

 

Ivy’s thorns were designed to lull and addict alphas to her unnatural omega allure; make them pliant, passive, and more susceptible to her mind control. Like most people she believed Batman to be an alpha and so frequently attacked him with this chemical cocktail. Until now his own omegahood had protected him. When used against him what would incapacitate an alpha simply added to the pre existing omega hormones in his blood. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. As he was, balancing on the edge of his heat, it was disastrous.

 

He spat the thorn onto the floor.

 

Too late. He could feel the clawed fist of his heat close around him, his body surrendering to the inevitable weakness of his sexual caste, and the weight of his helplessness drag him down.

 

“No…” The ring of his arse clenched painfully around the aching emptiness between his legs, insides heaved as they opened, and a trickle of wet ran down the inside of his thigh. “Not now…” He needed to call backup, needed to contact the cave, but he couldn’t because…

 

“Oh, Batsy.”

 

…he wasn’t alone.

 

Bruce forced his lips into snarl and tried to stand. As if in response a fresh wave of heat hit him and he fell forward, his growl broken off with a pained gasp.

 

A shrill cackle of laughter bounced off narrow cement walls. “Oh, Batsy, _babe_!”

 

Slim white fingers reached into his field of view and picked up the thorn with careful reverence. He watched as those fingers carried the tiny bloody blade up to the gaping red maw of their owner’s mouth and held it still as a long pink tongue slipped out to taste it.

 

“Where…” he rasped, staring into those swirling chemical coloured eyes. “Where are the hostages, Joker?”

 

A shrill cackle. “Hostages?! That’s all you can say? At a time like this?” The clown tossed aside the thorn. “It’s your big coming out!”

 

“Where are they?!”

 

Joker ignored him and clapped his hands to his chest. “You know, I never would have thought it of you. Oh no. Not my big mean Batman. He’s an alpha, I thought. Rutter through and th…” he trailed off. “Oh Batsy… you’re starting to scent.”

 

Everything felt hot and heavy inside him, the skin on his inner thighs super sensitive, and his cock crushing painfully tight against the confines of his costume. His skin heated, sides shivered, and guts ached around the emptiness inside him. All of it symptoms of the sickening overdose of hormones assaulting him. Hitting him so hard they burnt through his scent mask and spilled into the open air in sticky sweet promise.

 

“No!” He lunged forward with a ragged snarl.

 

Joker tumbled out his reach with pitching laugh. “Oh, Bats, why didn’t you tell me this was a bad night?! I would have just killed this batch and waited till next week.”

 

“Where are they?!” He slammed a fist into the wall and dragged himself back onto his feet.

 

“Hush now. You don’t need to worry about me. I’m not one of _them_ , you know.” A shrill giggle. “Oh no. I’m like you. Used to be, I should say. I used to be like you.”

 

He lurched forward, grabbed the front of the ragged purple suit, and slammed the man against the wall. “Where are they?!”

 

“Oh!” a cackling laugh. “Oh dear! That’s the hormones messing with your head, isn’t it?” He leant forward. “I remember what it was like, you know. The wiggly wormy _bits_ inside. Hollow. So hollow it _hurts_. But don’t you worry. I can fix you, just like I did me, and you won’t have to waste time with all of _this_. Oh no.”

 

He punched him. “Where are they?!”

 

Joker’s smile yawned like the jaws of a shark before him, shaping the words with a twist of lip and clack of rotting teeth. “It’ll j-just be you and me, Bats,” the clown wheezed, “a pair of cut up bitches beating those knotting bastards at their own ga— ”

 

He slammed him back into the wall. “Don’t call me that!”

 

“It’s what we are,” Joker jeered. His face hung open in a gaping grin and rank breath hissed between yellowed teeth. “You know the word. Oh-may- _gah!_ ”

 

His fist met that pointed jaw. “Don’t call me that!”

 

“Ah! Oh Batsy! Hit a sore spot did I? No shame in it. That’s what they all say. Bend over. No sha—”

 

He struck him just as another cramp hit him, sent a surge of pain through his side, and almost buckled his knees. He slumped against the wall, gasped for air, and gritted his teeth as a hormone induced wave of anxiety washed through him. He was going into his heat and he wasn’t in a nest. He wasn’t…

 

“I won’t tell anyone,” Joker said leaning against the wall. “It’ll be our little secret.” An ugly snigger. “Oh, Batsy… you’re an omega.”

 

“Shut up!”

 

The man buckled forward in a fit of wild laughter and clapped his hands. “You’re an omega!”

 

Bruce pushed off the wall, tackled him back to the ground, and began punching him. Hard. Too hard. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because that face still grinned up at him, those green eyes shone with secret, satisfied, glee, and the accusation kept bubbling up from his lips in bursts of blood.

 

“Y…you’re… heh heh… an… you… Batsy… you’re…”

 

“Shut up!”

 

He knew it was the hormones. Knew it was the anxiety rising to panic as his body took note of the cold, concrete hall, and his lack of provisions. Knew it was the pain, the twist and clench of his muscles, and the pounding in his head. Knew it was even the first frantic notes of desire surging through his body… he knew that. But it didn’t matter. Not then.

 

“You don’t call me that,” he snarled. “You don’t fucking call me that.”

 

Laughing green eyes on a bloody face.

 

“Don’t ever call me that.”

 

“Oh… B…Batsy…”

 

“Batman!”

 

A hand landed on his shoulder and a second grabbed his wrist, stopping his fist just shy of the mangled face sniggering and spitting blood up at him.

 

“Batman, what the hell are you…?” the voice trailed off as Bruce turned towards the familiar face of the fellow vigilante.

 

“Batgirl…” he croaked.

 

The woman stared at him for a moment. Studied him. Inhaled.

 

“Shit.”

 

An arm wrapped under his arm and hauled him to his feet. Dragged him along at a jog down the corridor, abandoning the clown to his wheezing laughter, and headed for the square door at the end of the all. For the way out.

 

“The hostages,” Bruce began. “We can’t…”

 

“My dad is here,” Barbara said. “The police came in just behind me.”

 

“We can’t leave the hostages,” he tried again with more conviction. “Harley will kill them.”

 

She kicked open the door and pulled him through. “I’ll get them once you’re out of here,” she panted. Turned and dragged him down another hall. “Damn it, Bruce, why the hell did you come out? Do you realise what would happen if any of the police found out? Or even just my dad? And… God you’re heavy… come on… yes, that’s it… run… I’m going to get you back into the batmobile and then Alfred can drive it back remotely. Okay?”

 

“There are fourteen people,” he said between his teeth as he ran. “Fourteen…”

 

“We’ll get them. Joker’s down. The police are here. Now we just need to get you out.”

 

“I…” Bruce sucked in a shaky breath of air. “I… fuck…” His whole body clenched involuntary, his stomach lurched, and another wave of irrational fear crashed through him.

 

Her hand squeezed his shoulder. “I know. Just don’t stop. They’re right behind us.”

 

They were.

 

He could hear it all with frightening clarity. The shouts echoing down the twisting cement hallways as they came across the laughing, bloody, clown. The thundering footsteps of SWAT teams moving through the surrounding rooms. The horse yells of surprise as the alphas among them picked up his scent.

 

He gritted his teeth and ran faster.

 

Ran against the pain and the panic.

 

Against the primeval, animistic desire, just starting to burn through him.

 

Against all instinct.

 

Just like he had been doing for years.

 

He always knew this was a danger. He knew the first day he took to the streets under a cape and cowl that this could happen. And he knew what it meant when it did; what it meant to be discovered, what it meant for Batman, for Gotham, and for the years he’d spent dedicated to saving his city. He knew what would be destroyed if anyone knew.

 

And so he ran. He ran, blindly following her lead, until he stumbled.

 

“Come on, Bruce, we’re almost there,” Barbara pleaded. “Don’t stop. Come on.”

 

They were outside. He blinked and looked around the deserted lawn and the looming shape of the half built apartment block behind him. How…?

 

“Come on.”

 

He was sweating, aching, and shivering. His mouth was dry, open, and heaving. God, but Ivy’s hormones were causing it to hit him harder than usual.

 

“Bruce please! Work through it. Come on.”

 

He clenched his teeth together and forced his eyes to roam across the darkened lot until he found the shape of the batmobile sheltering under the shoulder of an office block. It wasn’t far. He could make it. He’d already made it out of the building. He could make it the last hundred feet across the lawn and into the driver’s seat.

 

A deep breath brought a steadying taste of Gotham at night. Of people, petrol, and power. A dark, lulling, siren song that helped him swallow the lump in his throat and stagger towards the safety of the car that would take him back to the cave.

 

Barbara pulled open the door and he fell gratefully into the seat feeling his body instinctually relax as he entered the familiar environment.

 

“Get the hostages,” he growled in the closest thing to the bat voice he could manage. “Make sure they’ve got Joker. Harley has fewer than twenty men with her. Most armed. Semi automatics.”

 

“Can I have your disrupter then?”

 

He nodded and she quickly fished the gadget from his belt. The shoulder of her cape was torn and punched through with a series of bullet holes, armour scraped across her knees, and red hair bundled into a weathered pony tail behind the shape of her cowl. Unlike the boys Barbara never liked lenses and her eyes were visible through the slots in her mask; dim with poorly masked apprehension.

 

“You can do it,” he heard himself mutter. “Just… be careful.”

 

She paused and the side of her mouth twitched upward in an exhausted smile. “I know I can. I’m a beta, remember? I’m not the one that’s stopping the show for some biologically imperative playtime.” She pulled the seatbelt over his chest, ignored his growled protest, and pecked him on the cheek. “But thanks. Go bunker down, okay? ”

 

He grunted and watched as she turned and stepped back into the elongated shadows of the city at night; heading back to the neon lit warehouse and the sound of sirens singing from the other side of the building. When she was gone he reached clumsily for the door and pulled it down. It wasn’t a nest but it was a safe place and that knowledge brought down the instinctual anxiety and gave him a brief space to try and piece the situation together.

 

The betrayal of his body meant he had to abandon the mission half finished but if anyone was going to bring those hostages in safely it was Barbara. She had only recently regained use of her legs and the years confined to the wheelchair had instilled in her an edge of caution that slowed her down but also served her undeniably well. Beyond that her compassion and analytical intelligence were far more potent tools than she believed.

 

Thanks to her, despite the disaster Ivy's unexpected appearance caused, he had escaped unscathed with his identity intact. The only complication was Joker. The clown was the only person who picked up his scent and identified it with him, the only one outside his pack that knew, loose thread that could destroy everything... but wouldn't. He couldn’t be sure, he never could with that maniac, but he didn’t think the clown would unveil the information. The Joker had been privy to other potentially destructive pieces of information before but had never used them against him. He had never done anything that could end their game. He prayed that trend would continue.

 

The dashboard flashed as it accepted the remote tie in.

 

“Alfred,” he hugged his side and gritted his teeth through another cramp.

 

The response sounded over the car’s internal speakers as the batmobile moved onto the street. “Sir, what happened?”

 

“I went into…”

 

“Miss Gordon informed me, Master Bruce, but how is that possible? You’re as regular as clockwork.”

 

“Ivy.”

 

A pause. “Ah. I see.”

 

“Alfred,” he sighed.

 

“Sir?”

 

“The cave.”

 

“Certainly sir. Suppressants, alpha hormone, and painkillers are in the glove compartment behind the first aid kit.”

 

He pulled off his gauntlet and reached for the glove box. His fingers felt thick and clumsy, sides heaved under the confines of his suit, and only the seat belt stopped him falling into the foot well as the car lurched around a corner. He finally found the small black box of needles, wrestled it open, and injected them into his arm blind to which was which or the dosage they carried.

 

Suppressants battled the symptoms of a heat and depending on the potency either reduced or completely eradicated the overt signs of the crest in an omega’s cycle. Alpha shots were simpler and just a mixed sample of alpha hormones that would combat the excess of omega hormone in his blood. The painkillers made the whole process somewhat bearable.

 

He slumped back in his seat and pressed the heel of his palm to his brow as he waited for whatever chemical cocktail he had just injected into his system to take effect.

 

“Batman!” The voice crackled through the communicator in his cowl. “Batman, are you there?”

 

He frowned. “Superman?”

 

“Yeah,” Clark’s familiar voice was laced with uncharacteristic urgency. “We’ve got a fleet of hostile alien spacecraft on radar. The Justice League is assembling at the Watchtower in ten for a brief and then we need to move. Hawkgirl says they look Gordianian.”

 

“Can’t,” he growled, hugging his side. “Busy.”

 

“Jesus, Br-I don’t know what…” A patch of static. “…need you, Batman. I know you’re just part time but this could be big. Please, just get to a transporter.”

 

“Busy.”

 

“Bruce! Listen to me. The police can handle whatever it is you’re doing. We need you. People could die.”

 

A long pause. “Fine.”

 

Gratefully. “Thank God. I owe you for this one. See you up here in a few, yeah?”

 

"Yeah."

 

The line went dead with a soft pop.

 

“Sir," Alfred began slowly. "I am hoping I misheard that.”

 

“I need more suppressants."

 

“Sir,” the butler tried again, “I simply can not endorse this. You have just taken a dose of O4 and any more for the next twenty hour hours will you above…”

 

He rubbed at his stomach as the craps started to recede. “I know the numbers, Alfred.”

 

A crackle over the speakers. “Master Bruce, need I remind you that you haven’t had an uninterrupted heat in over a year. Your body needs a break. If you come back here we can….”

 

“I don’t need a break," he growled.

 

“Please try to remember what happened last time you broke too many heats,” the butler implored. “I can no allow you to overdose on another round of suppressants.”

 

A pause.

 

“You won’t give them to me,” Bruce concluded.

 

“I can not in good conscious do that,” Alfred confirmed.

 

“Manual control override.”

 

“Master Bruce!”

 

“Cut communications to Batcave.”

 

“This is n—”

 

The speaker went dead with an angry spike of static.

 

He took hold of the wheel, swallowed the last sickening symptoms of his heat, and swerved into a side street. There was a teleporter that could take him to the Watchtower in an old safe house on the north side of the Diamond District. There he would find a scent dampening facility so he could re-mask and once on the satellite station the emergency pack of suppressants to hold off the full onslaught of his heat. As soon as this disaster was averted he would return to let Alfred worry about his omega blood count and swallow enough sleeping pills to knock himself out for the rest of his heat.

 

But until then he wouldn't let his caste defeat him. He wouldn’t let his omegahood come between him and his mission. He wouldn’t let what he was come between him and Batman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those returning to this universe with me; this is the first chapter of the prequel to 'In the Dark' and will be dealing with a slightly different cast of characters from the other stories in this series. However, it will still circle around the same themes of the other stories just in a less secular setting and hopefully shine some light onto exactly how the situation at the start of 'In the Dark' came into being. This is also my primary project right now and should come out fairly fast. I am sorry to those who were really gunning for an MPreg sequel and I can promise that is right around the corner.
> 
> I really hope you enjoyed this chapter! Kudos and comments are very much loved. Thanks for reading!
> 
> UPDATE! Have you ever wanted to see this scene in comic form? Well now you can right [HERE!](http://palavengarden.tumblr.com/post/144748183810/next-a-thing-i-want-to-practice) Check it out. It's actually amazing.


	2. Chapter 2

Barbara hated sitting. She had been sitting down for years; trapped within the cold confines of her wheelchair by Joker’s whimsical bullet and the crippling break in her spine. Despite the number of years she had sat in that chair she never felt at home in it. It never felt natural to look up at others as she spoke to them, to wheel herself into the disabled stall in the bathroom, or to sit behind a computer screen and wait as others ran into battle.

 

She sat now for politeness sake, itching to stand but hiding it as best she could as she wrapped her hands gratefully around a steaming coffee mug, and tucked her legs under the seat of her chair. Alfred placed himself opposite her, gently set his cup of tea down, and smiled thinly.

 

“I must thank you, Ms Gordon, for your company. The manor has been empty of late.”

 

Guiltily. “Anytime, Alfred.”

 

An intermittent gust of wind rattled the windows, spat rain onto the glass, and sucked venomously at what little warmth was left in the ancient house.

 

“I am sure Master Bruce was grateful for your presence last night as well,” the butler continued after a moment. “I do not want to think what would have happened if you had not arrived when you did.”

 

“It’s fine,” she insisted. “He would do the same for me if I was in trouble.”

 

“Of course.”

 

They sat in a polished parlour room on old ornate furniture next to a low burning fire. Over the mantelpiece a portrait showing two brothers rested in a gilded frame engraved with the familiar cursive W found all over the manor. Despite the age of the painting the two men glared down at her with faces that looked disturbingly like Bruce.

 

“Have you, um, heard from him at all?” She asked hesitantly.

 

Alfred’s smile slipped. “No. Not yet.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device which he laid carefully on the dark oak table top. “But as soon as he does decide to contact us we will know.”

 

She looked down at the sleek black communicator grimaced. “They never think, do they? What it’s like for those left waiting at home base.”

 

He lifted an eyebrow. “As I recall, Ms Gordon, you didn’t used to either.”

 

She tugged her lips into an apologetic smile. “Yeah. Sorry about that. I guess I wasn’t the most considerate teenage superhero.”

 

“Trust me, you were far from the worst.” He took a sip of his tea. “You weren’t very good at keeping me informed but you made sure Bruce knew when and where you were on patrol fairly religiously.”

 

Barbara blushed and quickly hid it behind her coffee cup. When she and Bruce had first started working together she had quickly become infatuated with him. It didn’t matter that he never spoke to her outside of work, was old enough to be her father, or always went to charity events covered in women; he was her teenage crush. It was really just a childish fantasy but it had gone on for an embarrassing length of time and in hindsight was far more overt than she had believed. It was only when Dick, dressed as Robin, turned to her and said ‘you know he’s an omega, right?’ that her one sided love affair had come to an abrupt and awkward end.

 

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I suppose I did.”

 

The man watched her with a critical eye. “You don’t need to discomfort yourself on account of me, Ms Gordon. If you would rather stand I will not take offence.”

 

“I’m fine,” she lied and tried to settle herself more naturally. “Really, I’m just worried. I never got used to this… waiting.”

 

His face softened. “One never does, Ms Gordon.”

 

Alfred was the head beta in Bruce’s fragmented pack and had long ago established a parental bond between himself and the wayward leader. Once made those type of bonds were difficult to break and meant a whole lot more than any typical hormonal recognition. He looked at Bruce like a father looked at a son and despite the stillness of his fingers and unreadable look in his eyes Barbara could only imagine what it must be like to sit and wait for him to return.

 

They didn’t know how much danger Bruce was in, they didn’t know what he was facing, and they didn’t know how long his suppressants would last. They didn’t know if he was fighting off a horde of aliens, a horde of alphas, or if he was dead. That lack of information was painful to her… to Alfred, it must be agonising.

 

A loud thump at the window almost caused her to drop her coffee. Barbara looked up in shock and saw a coated figure at the window. Seeing he had their attention the man tossed back the hood of his raincoat and waved.

 

“Is that…?” She began.

 

Alfred stood, strode across the room, and unlatched the window. A gust of wind laced with freezing drops of rain poured in the opening as the man threw his backpack inside and clambered in afterwards. He slammed the panels of glass closed behind him, shutting out the weather, and smiled.

 

“Hey Alfred. Miss me?”

 

“Welcome back,” the butler replied wryly. “I will once again strongly recommend the front door as a method of entry.”

 

The man snorted. “I’ll use the front door when Bruce buys a house not three hundred miles long.” He threw off his coat and raked wet hair from his eyes. “Man, and I thought the weather was bad in Bludhaven.”

 

Barbara looked at him in disbelief. “Dick?”

 

His gaze turned. “Babs!”

 

He started forward just as she launched herself off her chair and flew across the room towards him. Dick caught her, spun her around once, and put her down. He smelt of rain, sweat, and carried with him the warm welcoming musk of her caste; a beta but spiced with an almost omega like sweetness. Unlike them, he was a low level beta which meant he was closer to omega than alpha. Both Alfred and her were mid level betas; existing perfectly in the middle of the sexual caste spectrum.

 

Bruce, in contrast was a high level omega; so far down the road into omegahood he had crossed that line serval times over and, at the crest of his cycle, was at risk of overdose on his own hormones. It was what made his heats so crippling and why it was all the more dangerous for him to be out with nothing but illegal industrial grade suppressants keeping his heat at bay.

 

“I heard there was a Batgirl back in town but I didn’t believe it,” Dick said. “God, I haven’t seen you in ages.”

 

“I’m not the one that left,” she accused.

 

Hurt. “Bludhaven isn’t that far. You could have visited.”

 

“Is that what you’re doing?”

 

“I could ask you the same question,” he cocked an eyebrow. “Looking to sneak back into the pack?”

 

She rolled her eyes. “I was never a real part of this pack and you know it. You boys were as thick as thieves and that includes you,” she nodded toward a bemused Alfred.

 

“Well,” Dick shrugged. “Can’t blame me for wishful thinking. You could be, you know.”

 

Her smile was strained. “I know.”

 

Bruce’s pack had always been a tight knit affair; operating both as a working pack and a family pack despite the minimal amount of blood ties between members. When she was younger she had worked with them but despite all effort was never really a true part of them. She was a friend, an ally, but she wasn’t really a pack mate. A lot of this, she knew, was due to the fact that she had another pack; one headed by her father that included her family and the most trusted members of the GCPD. Bruce’s pack was all or nothing in those days – its members orphaned without it – and her elongated allegiance and separate family had kept her at a distance.

 

Now she had a pack of her own. The Birds of Prey were an odd mismatch of heroes but they worked. Between them they had a good mix of castes and characters. The bonds had formed hard and fast. Most of them had other packs, families, and that freedom was like a breath of fresh air beside the inward facing and slowly fracturing bat clan.

 

They were a dying pack, she thought guiltily, and the death of Jason Todd had been the killing blow. Ever since that boy was killed Bruce had been distant and Dick had behaved more like a lone wolf. It was only thanks to Alfred that it had stayed alive as long as it had.

 

Despite the help she had been giving Bruce lately she didn’t want to form any pack bonds that might have to be broken a moment later.

 

“Right.” Dick clapped his hands together. “Where’s the boss? Still asleep?”

 

“In heat,” Alfred corrected him.

 

“And in space,” Barbara added, grateful for the subject change.

 

The man blinked. “Like, rocket ship space? That’s one secluded place to nest I suppose.” His gaze hardened. “Or, like Watchtower, Justice League, hordes of super powered alphas kind of space? Because that is one kind of space he probably shouldn’t be in right now.”

 

“He’s on suppressants,” Alfred explained.

 

Dick blinked and scowled. “You’re still letting him have those? You know he abuses them!”

 

Firmly. “He is an adult, Master Richard. I will not assume to dictate how he choses to manage his heats. I advise but if he choses a different path then that is his choice.”

 

“Oh,” a strained laugh, “so I suppose we’re all just supposed to forget about the time he almost died when I was a kid because of that shit. He’ll survive a few days in discomfort. It’s natural for God’s sake.”

 

The butler sent him a cold look. “You and I don’t know what discomfort a heat can be.”

 

Dick rubbed his forehead. “That’s not my point.”

 

“What he does with his body is his choice,” the butler continued. “I will not attempt to take that control away from him even if his choice is one that I may not agree with.”

 

Dick opened his mouth as if to reply, grimaced, and looked down. “Well, I made a mess of this homecoming, didn’t I? Starting a fight within five minutes of climbing through the window and in front of a guest.” A stretched silence. “Sorry Babs.”

 

“Hey,” she smiled awkwardly. “No worries.”

 

“I’m going to be in town for a few days. We should catch up some time; go to the Iceburg and cause some trouble.”

 

“Sure,” she replied. “In masks or without?”

 

A lopsided smile. “Why not both?”

 

She grinned. “Sure.”

 

He picked up his pack, swung it over his shoulder, and walked out of the room. Once Barbara was sure he was beyond ear shot she spoke softly to the man beside her.

 

“I thought you did tell Bruce you weren’t giving him anymore suppressants.”

 

Alfred’s face looked pinched and pale as he turned towards her. “And if I hadn’t done that, Ms Gordon, he would have come home first. I could have measured the dosage, made sure he dampened properly, tried to talk him out of it, I…” the butler looked back towards his abandoned cup of tea. “I shouldn’t have told him no, it was wrong of me to deny him, and I fear what the repercussions of that mistake may be.”

 

She shifted from foot to foot. “You think his suppressants will run out?”

 

“Perhaps.”

 

It went beyond that. Omegas in heat suffered from lowered inhibitions and could temporally lose some cognitive ability. Even with the aid of the suppressants it was dangerous for Bruce to be out without backup or at least an open communication line.

 

Barbara swallowed the observation and picked up her abandoned coffee. “He’ll be fine,” she insisted with a certainty she didn’t feel. “He always is.”

 

Alfred remained silent as he sat down and carefully retrieved his drink. “I hope you are right, Ms Gordon.”

 

When Dick came back downstairs in a fresh change of clothes Alfred disappeared to fetch him a drink and the pair caught up, resolutely ignoring the small black communicator still sitting on the table top. She sat and listened as the other beta told her about his new apartment, new city, and even his new costume. It was nice to be able to listen to the other man talk just like they used to when they were younger and everything simpler and somehow less scary.

 

Back when she didn’t mind sitting down and Bruce was a blue eyed beta she would one day marry.

 

When the sun began to sink she left Alfred and Dick to the looming chill of the massive manor to make her way back into Gotham’s dark derelict embrace. It felt wrong leaving them but there was nothing she could do to help and she couldn’t keep sitting there trying not to stare at the silent communicator.

 

Besides, she had somewhere she needed to be.

 

She took the train passed her apartment and walked down the familiar road to the block of townhouses overshadowed by the new LexCorp Gotham Division. As always her father greeted her by the door, pulled her out of the rain, and wrapped her with a gruff hug.

 

“God, it’s good to see you walking again.”

 

She wriggled out of his arms. “I’ve been walking for a while now, dad.”

 

Jim Gordon shrugged and offered her a small smile. “Doesn’t make it any less good to see. Hungry?”

 

“What’s cooking?” She asked.

 

“God knows,” he replied. “Sarah won’t let me in the kitchen, but it smells good and I think I saw some sweet potato disappear into an oven at one point.”

 

“Oh,” her smile slipped slightly. “Sarah’s here.”

 

He sent her a look over the rim of his glasses. “She _is_ my wife, Babs.”

 

Reluctantly. “I know.”

 

Her father was a mid level alpha, her mother a beta now living in Metropolis, and Sarah an omega he used to work with. The story wasn’t an uncommon one and didn’t need any explanation. When the divorce and the reason behind it went public all the neighbours had nodded their heads and said it was bound to happen sooner or later. She loved her father but she had never really forgiven him for proving them right.

 

“How’s work?” She asked, changing the subject as she hung up her coat.

 

“I’m the police commissioner in Gotham City,” he grunted and led her into the dinning room. “That pretty much sums it up.”

 

She sent him a look.

 

He sighed. “This fella called Black Mask looks to have got himself a new gun crazed rival to fight off, we had to haul Joker back to the hospital last night, and all we’re really making headway on is a potential drug bust.” He sat down and she propped herself against the wall. “Gotham isn’t giving many crooks right now. Not to police officers anyway. Maybe the guys in bullet proof tights and kids in bright yellow capes have had better luck.”

 

She thought of Alfred and Dick alone the cavernous belly of the manor, of the silent communicator on a dark oak table, and the unknown status of their pack leader. She thought of the fragile strings holding the Wayne pack together, the silent strained exhaustion on Alfred's face, and the single thorn from Poison Ivy that had triggered his heat and revealed him sexual caste before The Clown Prince of Crime. She thought of the years Bruce had been battling with his biology, keeping it a secret, and all to follow his impossible revenge. She thought even of the sheer improbability of his birth - a high level omega - and how much that had dictated his life.

 

“I don’t think there is much luck going around anywhere,” she muttered. “Not the good kind anyway.”

 

“No,” her father pushed his glasses up his nose. “I suppose not."


	3. Chapter 3

The Justice League trudged into the Watchtower like a defeated football team marching into the locker room. Bruce brought up the rear of the procession and tried to pretend his ribs weren’t killing him. His normally black boots were covered in chalky grey ash, armour shaved through at one knee, and cape a tattered rag swinging from his shoulders. The others were little better. Barry had a gash across his forehead and walked with a limp, Hal’s nose had bled over his face, and Diana’s sword had snapped off at the hilt. Clark hovered among them; hair flopping in a tangle of half curls across his brow and arms hanging limp at his sides.

 

The man caught Bruce looking at him and tugged his lips into an exhausted half smile.

 

Bruce looked away.

 

Under the confines of his armour his skin prickled and shivered; random points hypersensitive and itching to be touched. It was still just an itch, a precursor to the urgent _need_ of heat, but it was an indicator of the waning life of the suppressants and the strong scent – the presence – of alpha was making it worse. Both Diana and Clark were alphas and neither bothered to hide their scents. Beyond this there was another scent permeating the air; strong, earthy, and undeniably alpha.

 

“Your scent mask is breaking,” Bruce informed Oliver as he identified the source.

 

“Is it?” The archer sniffed his wrist. “Damn, I can hardly smell anything but those stinking aliens. You must have a good nose.”

 

His lips tightened. “So I’ve been told.”

 

It was known, if not widely acknowledged, that omegas had a superior sense of smell. There were many theories as to why this was the case. Some stated that omegas needed to be equipped with a better smell in order to smell anything other than their own overpowering aromas. Others claimed omegas needed to be able to smell sickness in a potential mate. He also knew of a theory that stated omegas - the caste primary responsible for raising children - needed to be able to smell emotional indicators such as stress and hunger in babies and easily track children when they wandered from the pack.

 

Whatever the reason it was one of the few boons his caste gave him and was subtle enough to be used overtly.

                                                                             

“Well,” Barry called over his shoulder as they moved. “I’ll tell you what _I_ cansmell. Blood, sweat, and my own feet. No food, champagne, and all those other things that generally go along with a victory.” He threw back his hood and wiped the blood off his forehead. “I got to ask, did we win? Or did we just chase them back into the sky for a bit?”

 

“They’re Gordanian,” Hawkgirl hissed, holding a wounded wing to her chest. “Worse, Gordanian _pirates_. They’ll be back for whatever it was they were after this time.”

 

“Which is?” Hal quested pointedly.

 

“Can we please talk about this tomorrow?” Oliver groaned. “All I want to do right now is shower and sleep.”

 

“I second that,” Clark called.

 

A murmur of agreement. Bruce added his voice, eager to be gone as he felt a small knot of need twist inside him. Last time his heat had hit him like a wrecking ball; sudden and devastating. This time it was more natural; a feeling that was slowly but surely seeping through his skin, permeating everything with a hot instant irritation.

 

“If we’re calling a meeting tomorrow I’m staying in the Watchtower,” Diana declared. “If that part of the Watchtower is still intact, that is.”

 

“It is and you can stay there. In fact, you’re _all_ staying in the Watchtower.” Bruce looked up as Victor walked into the hallway, metallic legs whirring gently as they moved him forward in a steady stride. “I tried to get the message down to you when you were still in the field but the comlink is too damaged.”

 

Clark sighed and folded his legs under himself, still hovering. Wearily. “What’s the story, Cyborg?”

 

“The transporters are offline,” Victor said simply. “You can survive in space, Superman, so if you want to go back down to Earth tonight you can just jump out the airlock. Same goes for you GL. The rest of you are stuck with me and the Martian. That mother ship hit us pretty hard. The whole of B wing was blasted off and half our power is out.”

 

Barry groaned. “I better call Iris. You heading down Hal?”

 

“Nah. Ring’s too low.”

 

Oliver tossed back his hood. “Looks like you’re stuck with me tonight, Batman. But hey, TV reception has got to be good when we’re right beside the satellite.”

 

Low. “I’m not staying.”

 

Clark frowned and looked towards him. “What?”

 

Oliver snorted. “Planning on jumping out the airlock?”

 

“I’ll take a Javelin,” he rumbled.

 

“It’s almost five hours flight down to Gotham without the transporters boost,” Cyborg reminded him bluntly. “By the time you get there you’ll be turning around and coming straight back.”

 

“Then I won’t attend the meeting,” he snarled.

 

Clark blinked, impossible blue eyes sparkling with confusion. “But, you’re the one that organised the strategy.”

 

“And the attack is over,” he clarified. “My job is done.”

 

“Batman,” Diana interjected. “We’ll need your reports.”

 

“You’ll get them.”

 

“But…”

 

“Later,” he finished. They were used to his eccentricities and no one challenged him as he turned, cape billowing from his shoulders, and made his way back towards the hangar.

 

Behind him he heard Victor sigh, voice echoing electronically from his metal chest. “Is anyone else ditching the meeting tomorrow or can I send power to the private quarters?”

 

Barry’s laugh was half felt. “I’ve read the manual a million times but I still can’t land one of those things. Unlike Bats I think I’m grounded… eh… spaced?”

 

“Spaced?” Hal scoffed. “Your brain fires faster than a kid on coffee and that’s all you could come up with?”

 

“I’d like to see you…”

 

He lost ear of the bickering pair as he made his way through the utilitarian web of hallways, picked up speed when he was out of sight, and took the waiting lift down into the hangar. The metal walls of the elevator were pristine; speaking to none of the apparent damage done to the rest of the space station. He leant against one, peeled off the sweaty skin of his cowl, and bit back the small sickened part of him that wanted nothing more than to be trapped in space with Diana, Clark, Oliver, and even Victor. With all the alphas of the Justice League. The strongest, most skilled, most exotic alphas on the planet. The world’s most perfect providers.

 

It was a primal part of him. The part that made him wet between the legs at the mere idea of alpha. The part he had smothered with suppressants for the past six hours.

 

By the time the elevator’s doors opened his mouth was dry and skin on the inside of his thighs raw with unfulfilled need.

 

He stepped into the hangar and scraped back the corner of his glove to sniff at his skin.

 

Nothing. Still nothing. Still safe. Even if he was lapsing back into heat his scent mask hadn’t worn through. Not yet.

 

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

 

He stiffened.

 

The musky alpha scent, spiced with an undefinable hint of alien, reached him a moment before the man floated into his peripheral. Jarring blue eyes, chiselled cheekbones, and a sure square jaw. The man’s muscles rolled off the shape of his shoulders and flowed across his body with a composed fluidness that spoke of the sheer amount of control that went into his every minute movement. Superman. The most powerful alpha on the planet.

 

Clark.

 

Bruce hadn’t noticed the man follow him and that in itself was disturbing. It suggested a cognitive weakness that implied his hormones were higher than he thought; his heat closer.

 

When he didn’t answer Clark continued, a little more hesitantly. “I’ve been able to smell Arrow for an hour. You still smell about the same as a shadow. Whatever you use to dampen is potent stuff.”

 

He grunted.

 

A long pause.

 

“Here,” Clark drifted forward, “let me help.”

 

Bruce watched as Clark moved passed him, pulled the normally electronically operated couplings off the Javelin, and pushed it back towards the airlock. It would have taken him much longer to have to climb in and position the ship from the cockpit and he grudgingly gave the man an appreciative grunt.

 

He got a blinding white smile in return.

 

“You know,” Clark spoke as he worked, “it wouldn’t kill you to spend one night getting to know the people on the League. Plus, we really could use your input at the meeting tomorrow.”

 

“If you really wanted my input you would put the meeting off,” he pointed out gruffly as moved slowly after the ship.

 

“Oh, come on Bruce. That’s not fair. We can’t just work around your schedule all the time.”

 

“And I can’t just work around yours,” he snapped.

 

Clark opened his mouth to respond, closed it, and nodded. “Okay,” he ceded. “I get that.” The hangar lapsed into an uncertain silence. “Hey,” he started. “You were really amazing today. I don’t know how you got into that alien’s ship but, boy, was I glad you did. You have no idea how good it was to fly in there, see that cannon, and look up to see you behind it.”

 

Another grunt. Another extended silence.

 

“And I… I just wanted you to know that,” Clark added lamely, filling the silence. “Thanks for coming when I called.”

 

Alone in the hangar Clark’s Midwestern accent could be heard lightly colouring the ends of his words, subtly drawing out certain sounds, and adding an almost musical lilt to his phrases. He had to listen to hear it, but once heard it was an undeniable inflection awarded only in private to those he trusted.

 

“Really,” Clark continued as he picked the ship up and turned it effortlessly to face nose towards the airlock. “I know you don’t like working with the Justice League as much but… man, you’re good at it.”

 

“When the League members choose to work effectively and remember their training it is not too hard to ensure they function as a team would.”

 

“As a pack would, you mean.”

 

He didn’t say anything.

 

“I, um,” Clark blushed as he settled the Javelin down, “I’ve never had a pack before. I’ve never even had any pack bonds. I know that must seem stupid to someone who is a pack leader but,” he shrugged. “I sometimes think if the Justice League spent time together without all the scent masks and secret identities we could be a pack. I know the caste ratio is way off for the ‘healthy pack’ but as a unit I think we already behave pretty w—”

 

“Are you flying back to Metropolis tonight, Superman?” He interrupted him, voice horse. He wasn’t in the mood to discuss pack dynamics let alone metaphorical ones.

 

Clark’s smile slipped slightly. “I suppose.”

 

He hoped that was enough invitation to get the man out the airlock as he used the computer in his gauntlet to tap into the idle ship’s onboard systems. His access was authorised and Cyborg had already remotely prepped the selected vehicle for departure. He stepped forward and the Javelin’s side opened like the forlorn arms of a yearning lover.

 

“Hey,” Clark called. “If you want I could swing by Gotham later.” His voice was nervous but determined. “I could help out with what ever is keeping you busy down there. Or we could just spend some time together. Get some food or something.”

 

Bruce stopped.

 

There was something about the way Clark spoke; an uncertain edge pieced hopefully against an unspoken question that sounded frighteningly like a proposition. Like the other man, the alpha, was asking him for something he shouldn’t even know he could get from him.

 

Clark didn’t know his true caste. No one in the Justice League did. Only a few knew his secret identity and, as far as the world was concerned, Bruce Wayne was a billionaire beta with enough alpha envy to cover himself in omega supermodels whenever he got the chance. It was an image that didn’t invite company. So why would Clark ask it from him?

 

It didn’t make sense.

 

Unless Clark could smell him.

 

From what he could tell of Kryptonian physiology their sense of smell was actually much weaker than their other senses. Clark, much more than humans, relied on his sense of sight and hearing to perceive the world around him as emphasised by his super powered skill set. Despite this, however, his super senses meant that even if his sense of smell was weaker than his other senses it was still far more powerful than that of a human. If Bruce’s mask was breaking, if he was in however small a way beginning to scent, Clark would be the first to know.

 

“You can smell me,” he muttered.

 

Clark blinked. “I… no. Why?” A long pause. “You don’t need to worry about your scent mask breaking. I’m the only one in here and I already know your scent.”

 

He hugged his side; subtly resting his hand against the kryptonite pocket in his belt. “Why do you want to spend time with me?”

 

“I…I thought we could just talk like we used too.” He frowned and looked aside. “I’m sorry. I know you’re too busy. Some other time.”

 

Safe. Clark was just… heat crawled under his skin and twisted warm and wet inside him; like an animal slowly uncoiling between his hips. A dull warning.

 

He wasn’t going to get back in time. He realised it with a sudden sickening certainty. The suppressants would wear off in less than an hour and he could start scenting again at any time. He had been able to feel his body reawakening again for a long time. Too long. He should have left sooner. Should have…

 

He grimaced as his muscles cramped low in his gut. “Damn it.”

 

A small wrinkle appeared between Clark’s brows as he looked at him; took note of his hunched posture. “Hey,” he drifted forwards, “are you alright? I saw that thing hit your pretty hard a few times but…”

 

“I’m fine,” he said gruffly. “Can you get me to Gotham sooner?”

 

“I… well… I could put you in a spacesuit and carry you I suppose but it’s a fair distance from where we are currently positioned and I wouldn’t want to fly too fast. G forces on the human body and all that. Not to mention re-entry. Even with my cape that would be tricky.”

 

Angrily. “How long, Clark?”

 

“An hour maybe?” The man said apologetically. “I would need to fly around the planet a bit.”

 

“Half an hour,” he insisted.

 

Clark looked at him. “I can’t do that, Bruce.”

 

“Bullshit.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

“I’ve seen you fly faster.”

 

“I _won’t_ do that,” Clark amended.

 

“Damn it, Clark. I need to get back.”

 

The man didn’t look impressed. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

 

“You won’t,” Bruce growled and gritted his teeth as his side cramped again.

 

“You don’t know that.” Clark’s eyes raked over him. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

 

He glared and started towards the ship and the man still standing at its side. “Fine. If you won’t take me I’ll make it alo—”

 

A hand closed around his forearm.

 

He froze. His skin ignited against the firm weight of the other man’s palm, insides clenched desperately as he inhaled the broad alien scent saturating the air, and cock twitched. He slowly turned to look at Clark.

 

The man regarded him carefully; eyes calculating but also non-threatening. He didn’t know. He didn’t…  “Is this like the time you broke three ribs and didn’t tell anyone?” Clark asked.

 

“I’m fine,” he hissed.

 

Clark’s look was disbelieving. His eyes unfocused and sank to scan his body; his x-ray vision quickly sweeping his internal organs; re-establishing nothing was out of place. Bruce’s heart leapt his mouth as the other man’s eyes sunk to look through his abdomen.

 

“Don’t,” he snarled and reached forward to lock a hand on the other man’s jaw, levying it up. “Don’t look at me there!”

 

Too late. The man was blinking at him in confusion. Bruce watched as that confusion slowly shifted in shock, then disbelief, and then something else as he glanced down a second time; reconfirming the presence of the tell tale organs that confirmed his sexual caste.

 

“Don’t!”

 

“I… I’m sorry I…” Clark’s eyes locked back onto him. “Is that…? Are you…?”

 

A low growl. “Let me go, Clark.”

 

Clark’s face twisted in horror, his hand immediately released his arm, and he backed away. He’d dropped to the ground at some point and walked backwards with strangely clumsy movements.

 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I didn’t know I… God _are_ you…?”

 

He felt like a spider ripped from its web and pinned down for examination. He was trapped, caught, and at the mercy of the man before him. Moments before everything had been attached to strenuous strings of control. Now even those had been wrenched from his fingers and some small sick voice at the back of his brain was cheering; some pathetic part of him loved the loss of control, the weakness, the indomitable presence of alpha… even as it made him – the real him – sick to the core.

 

In a single heat, not half over, he had revealed himself twice. Two outsiders now knew he was an omega. His worst enemy and best friend… and Clark was the one he feared. The Joker’s sole point of stability was his obsessive want for the sick game they played to continue. Despite his outward image Clark was more complex than that; his perception of what was right and wrong could dictate him into doing something, or saying something, that would be irreversible.

 

But, more importantly, he was an alpha.

 

That fact swam back and forth behind his skull; the knowledge both terrifying and savagely pleasing as the slowly reawakening instinct inside him reached for the meaty flavour of the other man; the promise that rich raw scent carried with it. _Mate_. This man could be a mate…

 

“You’re in heat, aren’t you?”

 

Bruce swallowed the raw dry feeling in his mouth.  “No.”

 

“I can see your gland, Bruce.”

 

He reached up to touch the side of his neck.

 

Every omega had an omega gland located under their jawbone. It was what an alpha marked when they put a claiming bite on their chosen mate, it was what contributed most to the infamous omega aroma, and it was all but invisible outside of heat. In heat it would swell and redden.

 

He had thrown back his cowl in the elevator without even considering what he might be exposing. His uniform alone was high necked enough to hide most of it and Clark had probably mistaken it for a bruise when he first saw him. Damn it, but it was his heat. It didn’t just strip him of his integrity but also his intelligence. His suppressants were wearing thin and he wasn’t thinking. He needed to get out of here before the dam broke. Before it was too late.

 

He moved toward the Javelin.

 

Clark bolted to block his path. “Bruce you can’t.”

 

“Get out of my way, Superman.”

 

“Bruce, you’re in…” he looked sick, “you’re… Bruce you’re not going to be able to land that in an hour let alone five.”

 

Firmer. “Get out of my way.”

 

He raked his hand through his hands. “Jesus.”

 

“Now.”

 

“Bruce,” Clark looked up at him.

 

Angry. “I won’t ask again. Move!”

 

“But,” Clark tried desperately, “the Javalin’s not a proper nest and…”

 

Something twisted inside him; putrid and angry. “What the hell would you know about a proper nest, _alpha?_ You think this is a nest? You think a locked room in the Watchtower is a nest?” He glared at him.

 

Clark stopped and stared at him for a moment. “Omegas in heat panic when not in nests,” he said slowly.

 

“I’m not panicking.”

 

“So you are then,” he muttered. “An omega in heat.” It wasn’t really a question but his silence seemed to say something despite it.

 

Clark grabbed him and for a flicker of a second the world disappeared into a rush of blurred colour. He grunted as he was slammed down into a seat and the massive double seatbelt pulled down over him. It took him a moment to register the interior of the Javelin. Sleek silver controls, reinforced metal walls, and a sharp electrical whine as the engines powered up. He snarled and tugged at the buckle.

 

“No,” Clark appeared before him. “Don’t.” A hand over his.

 

His breath caught. “What the fuck are you doing?” He rasped.

 

Clark’s jaw was stiff, eyes a blistering blue, and shoulders square. “I’m getting you out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a bit late. I rewrote it a few times and I still don't know how happy I am with it.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

Bruce was asleep.

 

Finally.

 

Clark sat slumped in the pilot’s chair, cape heaped on his lap, and head back against the spine of the seat. Before him the pointed nose of the Javelin cut a clean path through a thick clot of cloud; engines purring as the auto pilot carried them dutifully forward. Behind him Bruce lay on a fold out cot; unconscious and in heat.

 

He kept his eyes pinned forward and tried to ignore the fresh surge of painful arousal each breath brought him; tried to take in his stride the concentrated taste of omega pheromones assaulting his senses; tried to pretend he was alone and not locked in a confined space with an omega in heat.

 

But, God, it was _Bruce_. Bruce scenting stronger than he’d ever known any omega to scent, Bruce flooding the air with intoxicating promise, Bruce unconsciously advertising his readiness with the explicit smell of sex, sweat, and slick. Bruce.

 

His mouth watered with alpha spiced saliva, hands itched to grab onto warm flesh, and the tightness in his groin built to a near ache. He closed his eyes, swallowed, and wrapped his fists around the armrests.

 

Batman. It was Batman. The same man who ruled the streets of Gotham through fear, the same man who fought alongside the most powerful beings on the planet with enough skill and drive to make them look nigh on incompetent beside him, and the same man who had risen to become one of the leaders of the Justice League with nothing more than a brutal promise on a pair of aging graves. Batman. An unmarked omega draped across the cot; body worked to the point of exhaustion through violent bouts of hormone induced need.

 

It didn’t make sense.

 

He didn’t _want_ it to make sense.

 

He wanted to cling to the idea that this was all some impossible misunderstanding; that Bruce was a beta and had never lied to him, never hidden this from him, never looked at him and called him an alpha like it was an insult. Like it was the worst thing he could possibly call anyone. Like he hated him just for _being_ an alpha.

 

Another breath. Another crippling crush of arousal.

 

Bruce was his friend, his best friend, and he didn’t want to believe that was all the man saw him as. Despite everything they had been through together, despite what he had confided with Bruce, the man saw him as no more than the sum of his parts. And those parts were lacking. Never, in all the years they had known each other, had Bruce trusted him enough to share this with him. Never had he felt safe around him. Never had he seen him more than a dog sniffing after a bitch.

 

And despite the wretched feeling that knowledge left in his gut he was still disgustingly painfully hard.

 

With a groan he stopped breathing, bundled his cape against his face, and tried to ignore the indecent bulge he was making in his uniform. He needed to masturbate. Just to let off some of the excess alpha hormone he could feel pumping through his blood and in the arid taste gathered under his tongue.

 

Clark squeezed his eyes closed and bit into his lip hard enough to bite through a battleship.

 

He didn’t want to because he was terrified he would think of Bruce while he did it; think of all the things he could be doing to him right now, all the things Bruce would probably fail to object to in his current state of mind, all the things he shouldn’t do… and the things that would be unforgivable. And if he thought of that while touching himself – if he brought himself off to the idea of raping his best friend – he would prove Bruce right; prove he was just a cock and knot. An alpha like the man had thought of when he used the word like an insult.

 

He tried to tell himself that was stupid.

 

Stupid because he already had thought of Bruce while he masturbated. Stupid because he had fantasized about the other man for a long time now and never once done so maliciously. Stupid because he _knew_ he wasn’t a mindless animal; he _knew_ he was better than that and shouldn’t have to prove it.

 

But he kept thinking it regardless.

 

The Javelin lurched through a brief patch of turbulence and Clark took the opportunity to reach across the dash and fumble with the sequence of controls that would activate the stabilisers. It was a momentary distraction but he was grateful for it. Whatever could eat away at the time he had left on the ship with Bruce was a blessing.

 

It wasn’t long now. If he could hold on another hour they would arrive at Gotham. Bruce might not even wake up in that time. One more hour.

 

He clung to that thought and to the knowledge that what he was doing was right. He was saving Bruce. Getting him out of the dangerous situation he had unwittingly convinced him to come into. He was preserving the other man’s secret, his dignity, and trusting – praying – that the man he was saving was the friend he had known and not someone else now that that mask had been taken away.

 

He’d thought Bruce was a beta. He thought the man had trusted him. He thought he knew him. But now he wasn’t so sure.

 

Clark opened his eyes and looked at the sleeping form sprawled face down on the cot. A black gloved hand flopped over the edge of the mattress, booted feet were kicked wide, and his bare face was open and uncomposed on the rumbled pillow of his bundled cape.

 

Bruce had always been distant. Clark had thought it was just because the other man liked his space. He had never considered Bruce might be hiding facets of himself from him. Hiding what he was, a major contributor to _who_ he was, in the belly of the batcave. And now, confronted with the evidence of that deception, Clark had to confront the possibility that Bruce had hid other parts of himself from him as well.

 

Could his friend just be another mask Batman had constructed to keep himself safe and enclosed?

 

The idea was a painful one to contemplate but it did dampen the arousal that still stood glaringly obvious from between his legs. Miserably, Clark embraced it. Embraced the knowledge that even if it wasn’t entirely true Bruce had kept this from him; hadn’t trusted him despite the years of friendship he thought they had shared.

 

Clark thought through the admittedly small amount of omegas he had known.

 

Pete Ross had been a kid at school Clark had stood up for when some bullies were picking on him. The boy took a shine to him after that and they become friends. He’d been doting, helpful, and incredibly prone to flattery. He was one of seven omegas in his class of almost one hundred students. He married Lana Lang after she left Clark. Lana herself had paraded him blushing around the wedding with his shirt collar purposefully arranged to highlight the purple bite mark over his gland.

 

Was that what Bruce was really like? Domestic, affectionate, and happy to be meekly marched around and shown off like a prize?

 

He tried to ignore the sickening wrongness of the thought. Tried to ignore the desperate part of his brain that wanted to believe that the Bruce he knew was the real Bruce despite everything. But the truth was he’d never known any omegas even remotely like Bruce.

 

The first girl he’d shared a heat with was submissive to a fault, emotionally centred, and had blandly accepted their break up with an almost mathematical hurt before passively falling into a bonding relationship with another alpha.

 

Two years later he’d shared a heat with a woman who was playful, teasing, and almost catlike in her acceptance of pleasure. It was her brazen impractical personality that had left her without an alpha or the will to weather her heat alone.

 

Last year before his relationship with Lois he’d slept with his first male omega. It wasn’t a heat but their alpha omega dynamics had won out in bed despite it. He had whined, pawed at him, and licked him like omegas did in pornography. It had been attractive in a primeval kind of way but the easy way he accepted whatever Clark did to him was disconcerting.

 

Was that Bruce? Submissive, impractical, and passive? Could he really be so completely different from the friend he had known?

 

Clark stared at the sleeping face of the man and wondered who would meet him when his eyes opened. With this secret well and truly revealed all masks he’d been hiding behind would drop away.

 

He sighed and instantly regretted it.

 

Bruce’s rich aroma crashed into him with full force; the overwhelming mind lulling scent of an unbound omega nesting and in heat. High level. He _had_ to be high level. He’d never smelt an omega so strong.

 

Clark coughed, pressed his cape over his mouth, and tried to concentrate on the arid smell of his own body, mixed with the jet exhaust from that plane he saved yesterday, and the cold clean scent of the sterilised ship. Tried to ignore the raised omega gland just over Bruce’s pulse point, the sweat straying suggestively on Bruce’s lip, and the wide welcoming gap between his casually spread legs. Tried to pretend he didn’t take the smallest of breaths just to savour the air and imagine it accompanied with the unknown flavour of Bruce’s skin, to imagine what it would be like to press against and hold the beautiful source of that intoxicating scent, and to imagine what it would taste like to nuzzle under that sure square jaw and sink his teeth into that perfectly unmarked… this wasn’t working.

 

He needed to masturbate. Needed to get at least some of the extra hormones his body was producing in reaction to Bruce’s scent out before he did something unforgivable and irrevocable. Before he hurt his best friend.

 

The man’s heat had hit him in earnest half an hour after their departure from the Watchtower. Whatever he used to dampen had lasted longer than his suppressants and for an estranged few minutes the man had writhed in scent silence. Then, all at once, Clark had been able to smell him. It had been like a damn breaking. At first it had been tolerable but he had been sitting exposed to that scent for hours now and it was only getting worse.

 

He had to do something. They were through the atmosphere now but he didn’t want to risk getting close enough to Bruce to fly him personally and…

 

Bruce moved.

 

Clark froze.

 

He knew from experience that when omegas slept during their heats it was like the dead. He hadn’t been asleep for long but he had also been on suppressants and it was likely, considering how fast he fell asleep, that his body had reawakened during one of the lower points in his heat; the period where he would normally be sleeping. Moving now meant he was waking up. And if he had been in a lower point before it meant he would be in full heat soon. Full heat meant stronger scenting. God, but was that even possible?

 

Instantly Clark wished he’d thrown caution to the wind and dashed into the bathroom an hour earlier.

 

Too late.

 

He brushed his hair back into its usual split curl, wiped the sweat from his face, and hugged the cape around himself in an effort to hide the tenting of his costume. He feverishly hoped his cheeks weren’t red or his eyes obviously dilated as he retrieved a large bottle of water and a pack of food usually reserved for deep space missions and held them in front of him like a peace offering.

 

Bruce’s eyes blinked open and looked groggily around the corners of the cot. He frowned at his gloved hand and rolled onto his back to sit up and regard his full suit of armour with sleepy confusion before lifting his head to scan the room with slowly mounting awareness.

 

The second Bruce’s gaze found him the man’s features stiffened. With heartbreaking slowness he reached up to touch the side of his neck; checking to make sure he was still unmarked.

 

“I wouldn’t I…” Clark almost choked on the oppressive allure of the air, swallowed, and tried again. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Bruce.” Forced himself to say the words. Forced them to be true. “I won’t. I promise.”

 

The other man’s hand slowly dropped. His eyes never left Clark’s; watching him the intensity of an animal watching a passing predator.

 

“I… um… would you like some water or some food?” The question felt maddeningly amiss on his lips. Wrong. Bruce hadn’t had anything for at least half a day. As an alpha he shouldn’t be asking an omega if he wanted to replace what he had lost during the last bout of heat; he should be softly but surely telling him. Omegas often lost the initial indicators of hunger and thirst during heats and sometimes even later warning signs. That was one of the reasons why it was so dangerous for an omega to go into heat completely untended; they might not eat or drink until their bodies were so deprived the missing substance they were too weak to find what they needed.

 

Bruce pointed at the floor between them.

 

“Put it there.”

 

Clark felt his stomach lurch. Bruce didn’t even trust him to come close to him. He didn’t even trust him to pass him what he needed. He didn’t… no. This wasn’t about trust. He was an omega trapped in a strange place in heat with an unproven alpha. A very powerful alpha. It made sense for him to be careful.

 

Numbly Clark obeyed. He floated forward and put the food and water on the ground before backing up again. Once he was safely against the wall Bruce pushed himself off the bed, flinched as he stretched upright, and walked slowly towards the supplies. When he got there he collected them into his arms before backing up to the cot. Consumed the massive bottle of water in three timed gulps and ate the food with a rapid practised efficiency.

 

His eyes never left Clark.

 

Clark leant against the far wall and made a show of casually checking the temperate setting and moving in a way that would suggest he was breathing… even though he wasn’t.

 

When Bruce finished he stood and wordlessly moved into the bathroom at the back of the ship. His skin was already starting to mount with colour, his breathing labour, and his usually fluid movements break down; becoming broad and clumsy. Grimly Clark thought about the next few hours trapped in the same small space with Bruce in high heat.

 

A dull cold pain hit him.

 

He flinched and rubbed his chest at the horridly familiar ache. Kryptonite. Bruce was checking to make sure the kryptonite was still in his belt. That small final proof of the other man’s distrust hurt more than the kryptonite radiation ever could. Hurt more than it had a right to.

 

Bruce hadn’t trusted him with his true self. He hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him he was an omega despite the years of friendship they had shared. Now, he didn’t even trust him to keep his word. Didn’t trust him not to hurt him. Rape him.

 

Clark peeked through the wall to watch Bruce roll the shard of green across his palm before dropping it safely back into his belt.

 

He reminded himself it was just Bruce being safe. Bruce had never been in heat around him before let alone trapped in the same room. He didn’t know how well Clark could handle it… if at all… and Bruce was right to be careful. Clark’s erection was still hot and heavy between his legs, his mouth bitter with the taste of his own alpha hormone, and his lungs as empty as he could make them without it being uncomfortable.

 

He was a threat. As much as he wanted to deny it, as much as he would fight to prove otherwise, he knew he was the most dangerous thing facing Bruce now.

 

The toilet flushed but Bruce didn’t reappear. Clark frowned and looked back through the wall in time to see him turn on the shower and step, still fully clothed, under an obviously icy torrent of water. Clark looked away.

 

Waited.

 

When Bruce emerged his suit and skin were dripping wet, his boots left puddles with every step, and his cape ran droplets like the feathers of a waterbird. He slumped against the far wall, slid down till he was sitting on the floor and hugged his sides; silently riding out the first cramps. His shower had knocked his body temperature back towards normality and the water diluted some of the scent but it was only a temporary fix.

 

The only two things that would bring down his heat were time and alpha hormone. Clark swallowed the pooling of his own alpha flavoured saliva and looked away as Bruce gripped his sides and bowed his head between his knees with a low pained sound.

 

Alpha hormone would bring his heat up before it brought it down and there was no nonsexual way to safely transfer his excess onto Bruce. Biting his neck was unthinkable and no one had ever been able to prove the experience gave an omega anything other than a mark, kissing wouldn’t give Bruce nearly enough alpha hormones to combat the sheer overdose of omega in his blood, and everything else involved sex.

 

He glanced back at the man and watched as he gritted his teeth and forced himself to breathe in slow measured takes of air. When Clark had first brought him in here he’d collapsed in a fit of heat strong enough to deprive him of greater awareness. It had been easier to control himself before his long exposure and Clark had quickly secured the ship and done his best to ignore the writhing black clad figure in the fold out bed. Even so, when Bruce had finally collapsed into an exhausted sleep it had been a relief. But even asleep he was still in heat and still silently screaming his status into the small sterile apartment.

 

Now, hours later, it was so much harder… harder to think… harder to…

 

And Bruce wasn’t even very far gone yet. Not yet.

 

Perhaps he didn’t want to go so far. Perhaps he would be willing to share himself with Clark just to get over this heat as quickly as possible. No biting, no bonding, and no strings. Just relief. For both of them.

 

He had to ask. He had to ask while Bruce was still in control and coherent enough to give consent.

 

To ask he needed to breathe.

 

He braced himself, silently counted down, and took a single breath of air. The scent of the other man assaulted him as violently as ever. The shower had helped; lessened Bruce’s general aroma. But the fresh flood of pheromones to accommodate his new wave was already rising from him in an enthralling invigorating mushroom cloud.

 

“B-Bruce,” he stammered.

 

Steel blue eyes opened.

 

“I… I um… do you want to…”

 

Those eyes stared at him with unspoken authority despite the beading sweat and high colour of the cheeks below them.

 

“I mean I… if you want to… I’ve helped omegas through heats before and I’ve never bonded with anyone. I… I wouldn’t… I promised. If you want to I… just to… get this over with.”

 

It wasn’t the most elegant proposition he’d ever made.

 

Bruce regarded him for a moment before slowly shaking his head.

 

Clark shrunk away as if he’d been struck. “I… I understand.”

 

“No,” Bruce’s voice was a low, strained rasp, “you don’t. I’ve never had a mate.”

 

Clark felt something inside him give. To break away under the rough pained scrape of Bruce’s voice. To respond completely to the unuttered uncertainty, to the unacknowledged need for help, and to the pained admittance of inexperience. To respond… as an alpha to an omega.

 

He drifted slowly forward as if carefully approaching a skittish animal. “It’s okay. I can take of it. I won’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

 

He frowned.

 

“No bite,” Clark assured him. “I won’t kiss you either.”

 

“No. You… don’t understand… I’m not on… ah…” Bruce’s eyes closed, lips peeled back from clenched teeth, and whole body curled forward as he cramped, “…any…” an agonised gasp, “…birth control.”

 

Clark stopped.

 

“Any?”

 

“I don’t have a mate… I…”

 

“You don’t even have some for emergency?” It was so unlike Bruce to be unprepared. Let alone on something this important.

 

“I did… in B wing.”

 

B wing. The part of the Watchtower blown off in the alien attack.

 

With a sickening lurch Clark realised what this meant.

 

“Promise me,” Bruce said through gritted teeth. “No matter what I do. What I say.”

 

“I won’t touch you,” Clark promised. “I won’t.”

 

There was no other option. He had to weather this. He had to because even if Bruce was willing, even if the other man had accepted his offer, he wouldn’t risk inflicting an unwanted pregnancy on anyone. Bruce wasn’t on contraceptives and, for this, a condom wouldn’t work; condoms would only stop the needed exchange of hormones that would bring down the other man’s heat. With a condom Bruce’s body wouldn’t have access to the alpha hormone required to combat the excess of omega hormones inside him. Assaulted by the close presence of alpha but unable to get relief. Stimulated but denied satisfaction.

 

Omegas had been known to go crazy under those circumstances.                       

 

Bruce flopped down on his side and curled into the foetal position; fists bunched and pressed against his forehead and body shaking. His breathing was still, impossibly, slow. Practised. Meditative.

 

He was working through this.

 

Getting through this.

 

Finding other ways.

 

If Bruce could do that Clark could as well. He had to.

 

He bolted over to the control desk, opened the onboard computer, and quickly requested every source available on the Justice League database and online that related to omegas in heat. The flood of information was fragmented, broad, and the search system helpfully asked if he wanted to specify his search.

 

He didn’t.

 

The more there was the longer it would take him to read it. The longer it would keep him distracted.

 

A few moments later and with less than a thousand pages covered he changed his mind. Too many of these sites were uninformative, omegaphobic, or worse; framed with advertisement for omega pornography. Men and women with swollen necks, flushed sweat spotted skin, and violently quivering bodies. Near identical to the man on the floor behind him. He closed the search, brought up a few hundred novels, and opened two hundred games of tetras simultaneously. Once done he busied himself organising and recognising everything in the storage lockers, cleaning everything outside of Bruce’s immediate vicinity, and carefully measuring how much water and food he could allow Bruce to have during the next lapse in his heat. That helped surprisingly more than the computer had.

 

Alpha work.

 

It must release some of the hormones… or something. God but he wished he’d studied this better. He had never been as interested in the science of sexual castes as most of his high school classmates. He’d been more preoccupied with his developing superpowers at that age. He knew the basics but didn’t know the precise mechanisms as well as others.

 

Nevertheless, the discovery had him brushing up against every surface in a primeval marking of territory, rechecking to make sure all the doors were locked, and organising all the food they had in stock. Once done he returned to the ship’s controls to recheck their position. It seemed to take an age for the cloud outside to turn a familiar gritty grey and the small red dot to finally slide over the city of Gotham. His relief was short lived.

 

“Alpha.”

 

It was a summon; angry, aggressive, and interlaced with obvious sexual intent. Spoken with the same unquestioned authority he used when barking orders to the Justice League.

 

Clark turned and looked at Bruce now leaning against the wall and glaring at him; looking at him as if he were too stupid to realise what he should be doing right now.

 

“Bruce?”

 

“Here.”

 

“Bruce we’re…”

 

“Now.”

 

He’d never heard an omega speak like this before. He spoke with power despite the position he was in. Spoke like he expected to be obeyed.

 

“You don’t want this,” Clark reminded him uncertainly and shot a look at the time displayed on the Javelin dashboard. “I can get you to the manor in minutes, Bruce. Just a few more minutes.”

 

A warning rumble.

 

Slowly. “I need you in your seatbelt again.”

 

“Won’t kneel,” he growled. “Won’t.”

 

Kneeling was one of the most profound postures of submission and was typically taken by omegas when they offered themselves to alphas.

 

“I’m not asking you to,” Clark said meeting his gaze. “I’ll never ask you to.”

 

He frowned, looked down, and hugged his side.

 

“Bruce?”

 

No answer.

 

Clark took a shallow gulp of air, held it, and darted forward to gather Bruce up at super speed. His hand gripped the other man greedily, armed itched to pull him against him, and cock throbbed.

 

Not that alpha, he told himself. He wasn’t that alpha.

 

He carried the man back to his seat, placed him in it, and pulled the seatbelt across his chest. It was a strange clumsy echo of the action he had performed before they left the Watchtower. When he’d done it then Bruce had shied away from the touch with a flicker of a snarl. This time he arched towards him, tangled his fingers into his cape, and moved to connect their lips. Clark leapt back, abandoning his cape as it was yanked from his shoulders to drop into the other man’s lap.

 

The knowledge of what that movement had meant hit him a moment later.

 

Bruce had tried to kiss him. He had tried to…

 

“I… I’m sorry,” he stammered hopelessly. “I… please just stay there, okay?”

 

Bruce flashed his teeth and buried his nose in the red fabric of Clark’s cape. The motion wasn’t acquiescent, nor was it even omega-like, but he was staying put… for now. He was also still watching him but it was no longer like he was a passing predator; it was like he was pray. Backward. Bruce was looking at him like an alpha looks at an omega and it was backward, wrong, and also the most disgustingly erotic thing he had ever seen.

 

Clark turned away, desperately swallowed the fresh flush of alpha salvia filling his mouth and tried to concentrate on bringing the Javelin in to land.

 

He could feel that look pinned onto him as he brought the spacecraft down through the tangle of trees and into the low flung entrance to the batcave. It was a tight fit landing the ship down beside the sprawling wings of the Batwing but he just managed it and gratefully fumbled with the control that would open the ship and allow them to escape the confined space.

 

Done. It was done. He had saved him.

 

He should feel relief, rejoice… but all l he could think about was that piecing look in the other man’s eyes and the way he had tried to kiss him. Bruce had tried to kiss him. He… _God_.

 

It was just omega instinct, Clark feverishly reminded himself as he numbly switched off the engines; Bruce was just trying to taste the alpha hormones in his mouth. It was nothing. This whole thing was nothing. Meant nothing.

 

Something was happening beside him. People were coming into the ship. People were hugging Bruce. Taking care of him. After a moment he realised someone was talking to him as well. A man. A beta. Young enough to be the former Robin Clark knew sometimes come to stay.

 

“… need an omega shot?”

 

Omega shots were given to alphas to bring down their hormones. “I can’t,” he muttered. “Needles don’t work on me.” He blinked. “Is Bruce okay?” He turned to look at him. Bruce stood before Alfred, swaying on his feet, and scraped his cheek against his in a primal declaration of pack. He still held Clark’s cape in a loose fist.

 

“He’s fine,” the man said and stepped into his line of view. “We’ll take care of him.”

 

“I took care of him,” Clark heard himself say.

 

The man’s eyes narrowed. “How?”

 

“I… I didn’t touch him.”

 

“How did he get your cape then?”

 

“He…” tried to kiss him. Bruce tried to kiss him. “He grabbed it,” Clark said instead.

 

Behind him Alfred began to lead Bruce away. The omega staggered, growled, and looked back at him.

 

The man – Nightwing, Clark remembered – glanced towards them and then back at Clark. “I think you should go.”

 

Bruce was looking at him like he fully expected and wanted Clark to stay. Like he couldn’t even comprehend the notion of Clark abandoning him now. Clark had a hard time convincing himself he could as well. But he did. He did because it was the right thing to do, because no matter how much he ached when Bruce looked at him like he wanted to do nothing but ride him down into the earth, he wouldn’t – couldn’t – hurt him in that way.

 

He wasn’t that alpha.

 

He wouldn’t let himself be.

 

No matter how much a part of him wanted it.

 

The moment he was out of the ship and into the empty air he felt both better and wretchedly worse. His body felt heavy and sick; chest tight, limbs stiff, and gut churning. He wanted to believe it was a result of the abuse he had suffered turning back the alien attack, or exhaustion after days without taking time to soak in the sunlight. It wasn’t.

 

An alpha’s sex hormone would rise when in the presence of a heating omega. If the alpha stayed in the vicinity of the omega and failed to mate their hormones would eventually peak. That, mixed with the desolate taste Bruce’s long lasting lie, left him feeling desolate. Empty, used, misplaced. Lied to. An alpha that abandoned an omega in heat. A... No. He couldn't think that. Couldn't...

 

“Fuck,” he raked his hands through his hair as he flew. “ _Fuck_.”

 

Below him the shrill sound of police sirens screamed in chorus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry. Not a lot happens and it is mostly just internal Clark. I hope you like it regardless. This chapter has been a tricky one to put together. :)


	5. Chapter 5

There was a lot of symbolism and spiritual significance surrounding the number three. It was all over the bible, had been worn by the horse that won him a bet at the races a few years back, and was the number of blue lions on the Estonian coat of arms. It was also the minimum amount of people required to form a pack. It was the number of people left in Bruce's pack.

 

Not that it was much of a pack anymore.

 

Dick hugged his jacket around his shoulders and stepped outside. The rain had stopped but the air was still bitter cold and the ground a mess of mud and interlocking tire tracks. Further out across the lawn a single car remained. A single stark reminder of the disastrous invasion the day before.

 

He looked down, shoved his hands into his pockets, and stepped over the murky brown puddle lurking at the threshold. It wasn’t a long walk but the mud was slippy and clung to his boots in thick black clumps. It was a stale relief to make it down the slope, across the bog that had formed there, and into the small grassy grove right on the edge of the Wayne property. The area was overshadowed by an old tortured willow and surrounded by a stern iron fence. Dick had always hated that.

 

He didn’t bother with gate, climbed over the spike tipped railing, and walked down the line of standing grey stones. Each was engraved with the Wayne emblem, a name, and two dates strung together with a small hyphen. A hyphen that spanned a lifetime. He read the names as he passed. Solomon Wayne, Joshua Wayne, Alan Wayne, Catherine Wayne, Kenneth Wayne, Elizabeth Wayne, Abigail Wayne, Patrick Wayne, Thomas Wayne, Martha Wayne, and then a gap. A few strides took him to the last grave sitting sullenly away from the rest under the hanging limbs of the sagging willow.

 

“Hey Jay. Sorry it’s been a while.” He tested the ground, sat down despite the wet, and leant against the chiselled tombstone. “Happy birthday.”

 

Three was a lot of things. It was the month of March, the closest approximation of pi, and it was the number of years that had passed since Jason Todd was killed. Not exactly though. He wasn’t Bruce and refused to worship death the way he did. So he remembered birthdays instead and tried to forget the day, three months prior, that Bruce had phoned from across the world to tell him the pig headed boy who had stolen his costume was gone.

 

“Sorry I didn’t bring anything,” Dick turned out his pockets apologetically. “I was going to see if I could find those cigarettes you always used to try and steal but, well, things have been pretty crazy on this end since I got back.” He grimaced and shoved his hands back inside his coat. “You probably won’t believe this but the boss came home with an alpha last night. Or,” he amended after a brief pause, “really, an alpha brought him home while he was so high in heat he couldn’t even get out of his own bat suit.” The sentence sprung from his lips like an accusation; ugly and bitter. He stared across the aging graveyard and saw only Bruce from the night before; skin pink, eyes glazed, and pupils gaping as Dick and Alfred desperately tried to detangle him from his costume. _‘Where did he go?’_ Bruce kept asking. _‘When will he come back?’_ A drunken record stuck on stuttering repeat. An omega abandoned in high heat by their imprinted alpha.

 

Confused more than anything else.

 

Dick hated that. Hated that the smartest man he knew could be so easily cognitively crippled but his own hormones.

 

“You know,” he continued after a while. “I walked onto that jet thinking I was going to be the substitute alpha. I know I’m just a low level beta but, really, this packs got nothing else right now. I was going to get all growly and glary like you used to do. Instead I offered him a hormone shot.” A horse laugh. “How bloody beta is that? Here’s a guy on the verge of raping the man who adopted me, might have already done it, and I ask if he wants something to make him more comfortable.” His smile faded. “I guess I just saw that big fat S and didn’t think Superman could…” He trailed off, closed his heads, and let his head drop back to rest against the grave behind him. “Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t let some kiddie bullshit stop me. You wouldn’t have done that. Even when you were fourteen you were a better alpha than that. Heck, even before you were an alpha you were a better alpha than that.”

 

His voice hung unanswered in the air; a tree falling with no one there to hear.

 

“Maybe,” Dick muttered, speaking just above a whisper. “Maybe what they say about caste balance is true; that every pack should have a bit of everything in it. You know, because everything was okay when we were like that but when our one alpha left…” he stopped, swallowed, and sighed. “This pack hasn’t really been a pack since you died, Little Wing. Not really.”

 

It was the truth.

 

Raw, reel, and scraping out of his throat.

 

The admittance of his failure.

 

Betas were the glue that held packs together; the diplomats that brought together the more sexual of the sexual castes and kept the peace amid the mess of sex and hierarchy alphas and omegas liked to call pack dynamics. It was his job, as a beta, to make sure the pack came together in the wake of Jason’s death. Instead he had left. As strong as his instincts were the horror of what had happened was enough to smother them, to drive him from Gotham, and the pack. He’d told himself he was wanted to get out, be independent for a change, and make his own way in the world. In that endeavour he had been successful. He was Nightwing now, he had his own city to protect, and even joined the Bludhaven police department.

 

It was a good gig.

 

He had a life there. Friends.

 

He just wished it didn’t feel like an excuse to stay away from the pack he was meant to be a part of.

 

The pack he was meant to be a beta for.

 

The pack he was meant to be holding together.

 

The pack he was letting down.

 

He was the third member. Without him the pack wouldn’t exist. It barely existed now.

 

The sharp familiar sound of a car door slamming broke him away from his thoughts. He craned his neck and watched the car that had been parked in front of the manor started up and made its way down the sweeping drive way.

 

He swallowed the bitter taste that left in his mouth.

 

“You want to hear another thing you won’t believe?” He asked the gravestone. “After I told Superman to leave, while we were still trying to get the big guy out of his bloody bat suit, three police cars showed up, one with Commissioner Gordon in it.” That sentence hung in the air. It was the first time he’d said it out loud. The first time in however small a way he acknowledged yesterday’s disastrous turn of events. Because that night had not ended with Superman.

 

“I almost pissed myself when they walked in the door. They had a warrant and everything. I thought we were all going in, you know. That Batman had been caught.” He swallowed the dry taste in his mouth. “Not so lucky. See, it turns out Scarecrow has been making a weird kind of new fear toxin from O4. You remember O4 right? The big guy’s favourite suppressant?” He licked his lips. “The GCPD put trackers on shipments coming into the city and one that went from Wayne Enterprises disappeared only to show up… yeah, you guessed it, right at Wayne Manor. A whole fucking shipment.” He raked his hands through his hair. “How the hell can Alfred say he’s not abusing the stuff when he lifts a whole shipment from his own company?” He dropped his hands back into his lap. “Oh, but wait, here’s the ironic part. The reason the batcave scanners didn’t pick up the tracking device is because it was bat-technology. It was something Bruce had given Commissioner Gordon months ago.”

 

The scene replayed in his head; everything hyper realistic and popping out of his memory like it had been cut out and inked around. Gordon had walked in the door under a hulking raincoat surrounded by a small army of policemen and handed Alfred the rain smattered warrant with an apologetic look. Dick had known in that moment what would happen next. He and Alfred had both just come up from the cave and Bruce’s scent was practically dripping off them. The alphas among the police officers would follow that trail back to its source and find the entrance to the batcave.

 

Unless they found Bruce first.

 

He knew he was betraying Bruce, knew this would expose him, but it was better – so much better – that Bruce Wayne be revealed as an omega than as Batman. He’d run down into the cave, desperately stripped the omega of his remaining armour, and tried to pull him up the stairs.

 

_‘Come on, Bruce! There are alphas up there! They’ll smell you!’_

_Groggily. ‘Alpha?’_

_‘I… Yes. Alpha is up there. Superman. He’s waiting. Come on.’_

 

When the policemen had made it to the study instead of a scent that lead through a wall they found an omega in baggy sweat pants and a red blanket emblazoned with Superman's distinctive crest. Bruce had looked at them for a long time; took note of the guns, uniforms, and badges before turning to Dick. The look he had given him had been frighteningly coherent. Filled with bleak, black, betrayal.

 

“You know, Jason, he’s going to kill me when he comes around. I… I just didn’t know what else to do.”

 

Three. It was the number of musketeers in a book, it was the planet Earth counting out from the sun, and it was the amount of times Bruce had been exposed this heat. The first time was before the a castrated omega in a warehouse on the edge of the Bowery, the second time was in the Watchtower in front of the strongest alpha in the world, and the third time was in his own home before the Gotham City Police Commissioner and the boys from the DEA. All because of a thorn from Poison Ivy, an alien invasion, and because Dick wasn’t smart enough to think of a way out in time.

 

“You know the kicker,” he whispered. “The worst part of all this? If I’d given Superman that omega shot I offered he probably would have been coherent enough to hear the police coming. To think what that meant, warn us, and…” Dick closed his eyes. “Fuck. Fuck it I’m so sorry.”

 

If their positions had been reversed, if he was the secret omega and Bruce the beta, Dick didn’t doubt for a second Bruce would have thought of a way to keep his caste and the cave a secret. Bruce had always been the better thinker; the world’s greatest detective on top of every other title he could claim. But Dick wasn’t that. He was the gangly circus boy that thought he was going to be Batman one day because he could flip better than Bruce, the Robin that had survived through some cruel trick of fate, and the beta that had left the pack right when it needed him.

 

He wasn't Bruce.

 

He stayed sitting against the grave until the mud began to soak through his pants. With a grunt he pushed himself to his feet, wiped the worst of it off, and glanced back at the grim grey stone. “Next year I’ll have those cigarettes.”

 

As always the stone stared back at him; silent and still. The only grave in the tiny cemetery void of the distinctive surname and its old family emblem. The grave of a fifteen yea old Jason Todd killed because once, just once, Bruce hadn't been able to think of a way out either.

 

When Dick got back to the manor he slipped in a side door, shed his muddy clothes, and made his way into the drawing room. Alfred was standing at the window. A small pile of papers rested on the tabletop behind him.

 

“Hey Alfie.”

 

Coolly. “Master Richard.”

 

He swallowed. “I, um... what’s the verdict?”

 

The police hadn’t found the drugs but the discovery of an illegally documented omega couldn’t be overlooked. The car had belonged to Jim Gordon no doubt here the morning after his discovery to make sure the family knew what was going on. Whatever else could be said for the man; he had an stiff sense of decency.

 

“You could have sat in,” Alfred pointed out as he turned to look at him.

 

Dick looked down, shamefaced.

 

The butler sighed. “The commissioner has informed me that he will forget to file the report for another seven days.”

 

“So Bruce can finish up his heat before the shit really hits the fan,” Dick guessed.

 

“He is, however, freezing his assets.”

 

“So he can’t finish up his heat and take off with an unlawful inheritance.”

 

Alfred’s features were masked. “It would seem so.”

 

It was required on almost all legal forms for every adult to truthfully declare their sexual caste. Failing to do so was not looked upon kindly especially when it came to omegas. Due to the long standing inheritance laws unbound omegas could not inherit unless in a long term marriage with a beta. It was not common but not unheard of for omegas to drench themselves in perfume and call themselves a beta in an attempt to get their cut of a will. They rarely got away with it. Bruce had… and he’d got away with a house, a company, and a few billion dollars to spare.

 

Dick didn’t know what would happen next but he could guess the courts would come down on him like a ton of bricks.

 

“I’m sorry,” he muttered miserably. “I know this is my fault. But, it’s better than them finding out about Batman, isn’t it? I mean, they would have found the cave if they’d kept following Bruce’s scent.”

 

“Perhaps.”

 

A long pause.

 

“When he gets out of heat…” Dick began.

 

“We have three days left on that calendar, Master Richard. For now, I fear, there is little we can do but wait.”

 

"Three days," Dick echoed.

 

"That's right young master," the man confirmed. "Three days."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it is lame not actually depicting the events Dick is thinking about in this chapter. I hope to make it up to you with a speedy update and a promise that the event in question will be covered from Bruce's perspective as well.


	6. Chapter 6

“Why did you do it?”

 

Her father looked up, frowned, and turned his gaze back down to the papers held loosely in his hands. “Do what?”

 

“Wayne.”

 

He glanced up and looked nervously out to the mess of temporary offices through the open door behind her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Barbara.”

 

“Yes, you do.” She kicked the door closed, cut off the mess of noise spilling from the administrative mass of police beyond, and advanced into the cluttered office. “Bruce Wayne has done nothing but good for this city and this is how you repay him?”

 

Grimly. “He’s broken the law.”

 

“You know those suppressants weren’t for Scarecrow. God, when you told me about the drug bust I thought you were talking about taking down a dealer not going after one of the good guys.”

 

“That doesn’t matter,” he muttered still not meeting her eye.

 

“He’s an omega,” she hissed. “He wasn’t giving them away. He needs them.”

 

 “We never found the drugs.”

 

She stared at him. “So, he’s innocent.”

 

He pushed his glasses up his nose. “He’s an illegally documented omega.”

 

“So?”

 

“So, I’m the Police Commissioner, Barbara. I can’t just let someone break the law and get away with it.”

 

“Even if it’s a stupid law?”

 

He looked down. “Even if it’s a stupid law,” he confirmed.

 

“And what about the time you caught me hacking into th—?”

 

“Shh!” He hushed her quickly and glanced back at the closed door. “I thought I told you not to talk about that here.”

 

“You let me off,” she continued triumphantly. “You can let Wayne off.”

 

“Bruce Wayne is a good man but losing my job won’t help him.”

 

“It’s just one ti—”

 

“Damn it, Barbara!” He slammed the papers down onto his desk with a loud smack. “I’m putting my neck on the line as it is! The DEA can only keep their mouths shut for so long and the new district attorney is going to be gunning for my balls once he realises I kept such a high profile case sitting in my outbox for a week. Not to mention the mayor or the press.”

 

She shuffled back a step and looked aside.

 

“I wouldn’t worry about them,” she said bitterly, hating that her old pack leader could still induce such an acquiescent reaction in her. “Once you file that report the mayor’s going to be spending the next few months trying to get into Wayne’s pants and the press are going to be busy taking photos of it.”

 

He sighed, pulled off his glasses, and rubbed at his eyes. “The mayor’s married, Barb.”

 

Her lips twisted. “Yeah, to a beta.”

 

It was below the belt; a bitter blow that burst out of her like a cork popping from the top of a bottle.

 

Her father looked up at her long and hard before setting back in his chair. “Is that what this is about?”

 

“No.”

 

“Your mother and I had been drifting apart for years. You know that.”

 

“This isn’t about you and mum. Jesus, dad, I…” she hugged her sides, “I’m just saying the Wayne fortune is going to be enough to get any arsehole alpha sniffing at his door.”

 

He didn’t look convinced.

 

“And you know what this is going to mean for the press. This is going to be royal baby level of crazy over coverage.”

 

Jim groaned and rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. “I know. As if I didn’t have enough problems just trying to do my bloody job. No one wants to hear about all the mass murderers, super villains, or drug dealers; they just want to put down one of the only halfway decent men this city has.” He looked up at her, eyes earnest and apologetic. “My hands are tied, Babs. You know I’d give the guy a break if I could.”

 

She stared at him for a long time, swore, and leant on the back of the chair at the other side of his desk. “Yeah, I know.”

 

It had been stupid of her to come here, childish, but she hated being powerless; hated not being able to do anything but sit and wait as the lives of her friends fell to pieces around her. Worse was that it was her family that had brought this to Bruce’s door, that her father had told her about a drug bust and if she had just questioned him a little more, found out a little more, she could have warned Alfred and Bruce’s caste would still be safely secret. Now, once he was out of heat, he would have to suffer the indignity and injustice of the archaic omega inheritance laws as well as be punished for failing to subjugate himself to them the moment he presented.

 

What was worse was the fact he was famous… and about to become more so. Even if the court acquitted him and returned his full inheritance the media would make sure the world knew there is an unclaimed high level omega with billions of dollars in the bank for whoever managed to bond him. She expected an acquittal. The Gotham judicial system didn’t have a very good track record when it came to convicting omegas. It was why Selina Kyle had been able to walk away without jail time and why the Joker managed to avoid the death penalty for so many years. But, even if Bruce walked away without a conviction, his life wouldn’t be the same.

 

“How did you find out this time?” Her father asked. “You didn’t hack into anything confidential did you?”

 

She sighed and shook her head. “No. Dick called.”

 

“Oh.” Jim straightened the stack of papers on his desk. “Are you two…?”

 

“We broke up ages ago, dad.”

 

“I know.” He put his glasses back on. “I just thought with him back in town you two might have hit it off again.”

 

“He’s just a friend.”

 

A speculative look.

 

She sighed. “He likes alphas, okay? And why are we talking about him anyway?”

 

A small shrug. “Just nice to know what my daughter’s up to.”

 

“Me? I’m just trying to think of a way to stop my _friend’s_ family pack from going to the gutter because of the stupidest drug raid of all time.”

 

“Barb…”

 

She pinned him with a pleading look. “At least tell me what happened. Dick barely said anything. I think he’s blaming himself and I… I _hate_ not having all the facts.”

 

He sighed. “Fine. I guess I owe you that much after all the help you’ve given me over the years.” He put his hands down on the desk in front of him and frowned. “I went with the boys from the DEA to the Wayne Manor.”

 

Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

 

He blinked. “We had strong evidence to suggest a shipm—”

 

“No,” she shook her head. “I know the DEA went to Wayne Manor. I want to know why _you_ went with them.” A long pause. “Wayne’s a big name but really it’s pretty low end stuff for a police commissioner.”

 

“I,” he looked down at his hands, “well, this is going to sound really stupid now, but I’ve always thought - always _suspected_ \- Bruce Wayne might be…”

 

“An omega,” she muttered dejectedly.

 

 “Batman,” he said instead.

 

She stared at him in shock. “ _Batman?_ ”

 

He smiled grimly. “Yeah, I know, stupid right?” He shifted in his seat. “Wayne’s a bit of a dumb party boy sometimes but he has… something about him that made me think he was more than he seemed. Like he was hiding something.” His lips tightened. “Guess I got that one right anyway.”

 

“That’s why you went on the raid,” she concluded after a moment of stunned silence.

 

He nodded. “If someone was going to drag that bat out of his cave you can be sure I wasn’t going to just sit in the office and wait for the report. Batman deserves more than that. He deserves to be looked in the eye and told it wasn’t for nothing.” Jim dropped his voice. “And if there had been anyway I could have hid him I... but it turns out we had a very different surprise waiting for us.”

 

In a way it was a relief. He hadn’t gone there on some instinct to protect the alpha less omega or taste the scent of the high level in heat. She felt guilty for even thinking that of him. He didn’t notice; he was too busy staring down at the desk before him as if it were a window into his memories.

 

“You should have seen him, Barbara. He just stood there and stared at us like… it wasn’t fear, or heat madness, or anything. Some of the arseholes from the DEA growled at him and everything but he just stood there, taking it all in. Not scared, not angry, not desperate, or even lustful… just…” he fished for a word, “gutted. Like he’d been robbed.”

 

“Well,” she replied weakly, “you did take all his money.”

 

“I froze his assets,” he corrected her. “Just until the courts can sort out what’s his and what’s being put in the vault until he’s got a bond mate.” He sighed. “But I don’t think it was the money. The way he just retreated into himself and waited for us to leave. Bruce Wayne’s a lot of things but I’ve never seen a man look so simply defeated before let alone one in heat.”

 

A long pause.

 

Barbara stood behind the chair in the cluttered office, took off her glasses, and pressed the heel of her palm to her brow. Bruce was the strongest person she knew and she didn’t want to imagine him the way her father described him. She didn’t even want to contemplate what it meant for the man to look ‘defeated’ or what it must be like to have a secret he’d kept safe so long suddenly set in the spotlight. She just hoped her father was wrong and Bruce hadn’t been coherent when the police came; that he wasn’t carrying the knowledge of his outing as he suffered through the last few days of his heat.

 

“You knew,” Jim said after a while. “You knew he was an omega.”

 

It wasn’t a question but she answered anyway.

 

“Dick told me,” Barbara murmured. “When we were sixteen I think.”

 

“That long?”

 

A small nod.

 

“Has he… eh… ever had an alpha?”

 

She dropped her hand and looked at him incredulously. “Seriously?”

 

“I’m just wondering,” he replied defensively.

 

“It’s none of our business.”

 

“I know it’s not. I was wondering because I have only ever seen him with omegas and low level betas.”

 

A long pause. “You think he’s gay.”

 

It was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her. Ever since she found out about Bruce’s caste she had assumed the endless pile of supermodels and heiresses he dated in public was just another part of his mask. The eccentric playboy billionaire exhibiting what the gossip magazines liked to call a classic case of knot envy. Dick and her had always used to have fun reading those articles. But what if he really was attracted to the lower end of the sexual spectrum? What if he really did like omegas? What if he really was gay?

 

Jim pushed his glasses up his nose and slowly stood. Despite his position the office wasn’t a big one and the shadow he threw across the room as he stood seemed to fill up all empty space.

 

“If he’s standing up against old omega laws _and_ tackling the controversy of homosexuality there is a good chance he will lose. Omegas only get off because of the omega shortage and society’s need for breeders. If you really are still friends with Dick, if you really want to help Wayne, I advise you urge him to keep that part of himself out of the limelight until all this mess is done.”

 

“I don’t think he is,” she said as he walked around the desk. “He’s never had an ongoing thing with any of those women.”

 

Except Catwoman. The single shining exception. The one person he had pursued both in costume and out. An unbound omega. Selina Kyle.

 

He shrugged. “I guess you would know.”

 

“I guess I should.”

 

The gay rights movement had been making a lot of progress in the previous years in Gotham but conservative opinion was still a negative one when it came to alphas and omegas. Betas, on the other hand, had for centuries been expected to either fill the gaps in the pack or partner up among themselves and as such same caste couples were common.

 

While homosexuality among omegas was often considered something that only happened when omegas were trying to seduce alphas she doubted the conservative members of high society would look on it very favourably. Despite all they had done to clean up Gotham there was still a lot of corruption and she didn’t doubt there would be some people willing to pay to keep a rich gay omega down.

 

“I’ll pass on the message,” she said. “About keeping the girls out of the limelight for a while.”

 

He nodded.

 

She hoped he would accept it. Bruce was the leader of a pack, however small, and pack leaders generally didn’t take well to other pack leaders giving them advice. Given the current situation she wouldn’t be surprised if Bruce didn’t want the advice of an alpha. If he was backed into a corner she didn’t doubt there was only one person he would really want to listen to.

 

She fished her phone from her pocket as she left the building amid a bustling swarm of patrol men. She dialled the number from memory, put it to her ear, and waited the four and a half rings it took to be answered.

 

“Hey Alfred, it’s me, Barb. I’ve just been making an idiot of myself in front of my dad and he told me something I think you guys ought to look out for until this mess is cleared up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry if Babs is a bit out of character here.


	7. Chapter 7

His heat was over.

 

Bruce lay on his back and stared up at the chiselled ceiling of the cave. Rough rock, ventilation shafts, and a grid of lights all glared dimly back at him; a chaotically organised interweave of natural minerals standing in stark juxtaposition with the hard evidence of his occupation. Stumps of long ago shorn off stalactites stood amid the tangle like severed tree trunks; the remains of pieces he had cut away to change the cave into something that suited him. Something his.

 

A dim memory of a body against his. A hand at his throat. _‘Mine.’_

 

The batcave had been his first nest. A small rocky corner of it he found when he was fourteen just before his second heat down the old well he had fallen into when he was five. Despite Alfred’s protests he had taken a sleeping bag, a heater, and a bag full of food down and refused to return to his room despite the bats. In the end the butler had come down with a box of over the counter suppressants to make sure he was safe. Two months later, just in time for his next heat, Alfred had found a safer entrance to the caves and bought enough caving supplies to keep him as comfortable as if he were in the manor.

 

Over the years he had made the space his own. As Batman he had occupied the whole cave no matter where he was in his cycle. It was only after Bane broke in did he retreat back into it; back into a closed off corner, the small safe space, that had been his first real nest.

 

A different memory. A different body. A different hand. _‘Mine.’_

 

In the back of his mind he was aware of the dull voice of the alarm attached to his arm filling the air with its ugly insist chirp. It was a monitor that measured the amount of omega in his blood. When his hormones briefly dipped it would sound to remind him to eat, drink, and use the bathroom. It sounded now; shrilling informing him that his bloods were back to normal.

 

He ignored it.

 

He’d been ignoring it for hours.

 

He’d been ignoring it ever since his heat ended.

 

He didn’t want to take it off. He didn’t want to acknowledge his heat was over. He didn’t want to leave the cool calm of his nest. He didn’t want to face the disaster beyond the locked door… not yet.

 

He closed his eyes. Five more minutes. It was the promise he’d been making himself for hours. He made it again. Willed it to be true this time.

 

Another memory. This one new. A group of uniformed alphas standing in his drawing room saying nothing but speaking with their eyes. _Mine. Mine. Mine._

 

The men and women that had unwittingly exposed him to the world.

 

Bruce didn’t remember a lot of what happened after he slumped down onto the floor in the Javelin. The ships steel floor dug painfully into him, a nearby vent blew cool air onto the back of his knees, and the wet weight of his cape felt like a hangman’s rope around his neck. He remembered breathing slowly and steadily. Remembered knowing he had to keep doing so – through his mouth – but not quite remembering why.

 

 

He remembered trying to claw his way into the front of his armour with fingers too clumsy to even work the catch on his belt, remembered the sodden feel of his slick soaked underwear, and remembered desperately swallowing the needy sound that rose to his lips as his costumed chaffed on his inner thighs.

 

But most of all he remembered Clark.

 

Eyes impossibly blue, cheeks spiked with colour, and split curl lost among a mess of rich black hair. The sculpted Superman costume hid neither the man’s seamless alpha body nor his arousal bulging from between his legs. He was only a mid level alpha – his hormonal level within the typical levels – but with every passing moment he smelt better.

 

Bruce had called to him. Clark refused to come. Had asked something of him. Bruce knew what alphas asked. What they always wanted first.

 

_‘Kneel for me.’_

_‘I want you, Omega. Kneel.’_

_‘Kneel.’_

_‘Kneel Omega.’_

_‘You are mine, Beloved. Kneel.’_

He’d never knelt. Not in that way. Kneeling was one of the most profound postures of submission and while it wasn’t exclusively sexual - unlike presenting – it required the performer to fold their arms behind them and bar their neck. It was, when enacted by an omega, an explicit invitation for a bite. It was _begging_ for a bite. An alpha’s bite was the first step towards bonding, towards claiming an omega, and towards the full blown hormone addiction that would tether an alpha and omega together… and he was expected to beg for it.

 

He would never kneel. Even half mad with heat he knew that. He’d told Clark that. Told him with all the aggression he could muster.

 

 _‘I’m not asking you to.’_ Gaze open and earnest. _‘I’ll never ask you to.’_

 

Of all the things that could have come out of the man’s mouth that was the last Bruce expected to hear. Those words had brought him a brief moment of clarity. A short, sharp, shock. Then his heat hit him again, harder than before, and he couldn’t comprehend why he wouldn’t want this alpha. Why he wouldn’t want to be fucked by him, be bitten by him, and bear his children for the rest of his life. How could he not want that?

 

The most powerful man on the planet who would never ask him to kneel. The blue eyed alien who had had already proved himself a provider. The hero he had known for years tenting his costume with a cock that looked big enough to fill the painful emptiness inside him. To turn the ugly ache of his heat into something that felt _good_. Better than good. Better than great. Better than words.

 

Strong. Safe. Alpha.

 

Bruce shifted uncomfortably. The bed was firm and he could feel a waterproof mattress protector under the fitted sheet. At some point he had kicked the rest of the bedding aside and was covered only by a loose pair of sweatpants chalky with dried slick. By the time he had been led into his nest he hadn’t wanted to try and think of anything, let alone anything omega, let alone anything like a pad.

 

Because after Clark… the next thing he remembered was Dick.

 

His stomach rolled at the thought.

 

He’d been swimming through a cloud of debilitating disorientation. The alpha was gone and he couldn’t understand why. They had food, they had water, and now they even had a nest. Why did he leave? The only answer he could come up with was there was another heating omega in his territory. One the alpha liked better. One Bruce needed to defeat if he wanted the alpha back… but he couldn’t smell one. He couldn’t… so _where_ was he?

 

Dick had melted out of the darkness; eyes wide, face pinched, and voice sounding like it was coming to him from a great distance. Bruce didn’t understand it, didn’t try to understand it… until he said alpha. That single word had struck a cord in him. Deep, desperate, and demanding.

 

_"Alpha?"_

 

Dick had nodded desperately, grabbed his hand, and said alpha again among a tangle of other words. One of which was Superman.

 

So he had followed.

 

Bruce gritted his teeth against the memory, against the sickening sequence of events that followed it, and the wretched meaning of it all. It was no good. He couldn’t keep himself from replaying the scene over and over again in his mind. A grisly film stuck on repeat that he couldn’t bring himself to look away from even though he knew what was coming next. Even though he knew how much he hated it.

 

He had stumbled up the stairs after the retreating beta like a dog on a leach. Every step left him feeling worse than the one before, every breath weaker. His mouth was thick with the taste of his own pheromones, stairs icy under his bare feet, and the aching wet emptiness inside him felt gluggy, bloated, and sickeningly unsated. He was dragging something large and red behind him that whispered oddly against the polished stonework.

 

By the time he got to the top of the stairs he stopped, blinked, and wiped the sweat off his brow. Something hadn’t felt right then. He knew he was looking for the alpha… for Clark, but… he didn’t know if he should be. He didn’t know if this was right. He didn’t think he should be here.

 

If he had been left to himself he might have realised what was happening and turned around. Instead his arm was seized in the firm but friendly fingers of the young beta, of his pack mate, and he let himself be guided dumbly forward. A pig to the slaughter.

 

He stepped into the study, the grandfather clock swung closed behind him, and then a minute of estranged silence before the door flew open and a small army of uniformed alphas poured in.

 

It was a cruel moment for clarity to return.

 

Made worse by the sickening knowledge of who had done this to him. The man who was standing at his side.

 

 

The betrayal left him feeling hollow, hurt, and helpless; pushed beyond the anger he should be feeling into the dark realm beyond.

 

Dick…

 

There had been seven alphas. One, to her credit, had tried to do her job. Tried to inform him of what was happening and what his rights were in this situation. Another inhaled once, coughed, and turned on his heel to march out of the room. The third stepped forward with aggressive intent was pulled out of the room by a beta workmate. Among the four that remained one stared at him, seemingly frozen, and two growled and flashed their teeth in hungry snarls. The last one was Jim Gordon. Jim Gordon shoving the remaining alphas back into line, telling him they were sorry; that they would leave now, and glaring down the head alpha when he tried to protest.

 

Later Bruce had sat on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, and listened to the two men argue in the hallway.

 

 _‘Do you really want to be the guy that ordered an omega pulled out of his nest for using suppressants, agent?’_ A pause. _‘Do you think that will get you your promotion?’_

He had always known Jim was a lead alpha but he had never really experienced it until then. It was evident in the way he skilfully dominated proceedings despite having no official authority over the federal agents. Bruce hated how much that comforted him. How, despite everything, it still made him want to lie on his chest and arch up for the other man.

 

 _‘This isn’t your high profile drug bust anymore.’_ Jim concluded.

 

 _‘But,’_ the man had protested weakly. _‘The files said they were all betas.’_

 

 _Yeah, they did.’_ Grimly. _‘But that’s my department.’_

 

The alarm was still sounding shrill and sharp in his ears; a constant cruel reminder that he couldn’t hide in here anymore.

 

His heat - and his five minutes - were up.

 

Bruce sat up, tore the small black box off his upper arm, and threw it across the room. It smashed against the rocky wall and the irritating chime cut off with a static pop. The silence that followed was thick enough to put a knife in.

 

His heat was over.

 

He couldn’t go on pretending it wasn’t.

 

He couldn’t keep hiding in his nest.

 

He had to leave, had to face his pack, and the world.

 

Millions of eyes looking at him all thinking one thought. _Mine._

 

Bruce swallowed down the bitter taste of that thought, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and pushed himself to his feet. The small Spartan bedroom had been sectioned off from the rest of the cave and equipped with a bathroom behind a sturdy steel door. Alfred had left a fresh change of clothes in the cupboard and a couple of clean towels folded on the countertop.

 

Bruce showered, changed, and took the excuse to shave. He wished he didn’t. Under the fresh shadow of facial hair his face was newly chiselled and gaunt; his whole body brutally stripped of its excess fat in the last few days of heat.

 

The physical process of heat took a lot from a body.

 

When he returned to the bedroom he stood for a moment, conjuring the last shred of courage needed to step through the reinforced door. Something caught his eye.

 

The sheets he’d kicked off the bed lay in a twisted heap on the ground. Among the stark white cotton a streak of emboldening red shone like a ray of sun against a cloudy sky. He bent down and pulled the square of silky fabric free of the rumbled bedding. He didn’t remember owning a blanket like this. He didn’t know why Alfred would let something so fine be on his bed when he was in heat.

 

An idea occurred to him. His stomach rose into his mouth as he slowly turned the material around. There, plastered across the royal red, was a golden gilt outline of the house of El. Superman’s infamous crest.

 

This was Clark’s cape.

 

The red thing he’d dragged up the stairs, the blanket he’d been wrapped in while he sat on the sofa… Clark’s cape.

 

Why would Clark leave him with this? Why would he give it to him in the first place? He fished through his subconscious and found a dim memory almost lost in the haze of heat. He had grabbed the cape, remembered the feel of it through his glove, and the way it bunched up around his fist. But Clark had pulled away. Pulled away from… Bruce frowned. From what? He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t quite remember. Couldn’t quite make sense of the flush of muddied memories stemming from his brain. Except maybe…

 

He reached up and touched his lips. Had he kissed Clark?

 

Could he of?

 

He hated that he didn’t know. That he wasn’t sure. That he could have missed a first kiss.

 

It was ridiculous to worry about it in the wake of everything else that had happened, Bruce told himself. Even if they had kissed they hadn’t done anything else. He wouldn’t have felt so keenly, unquestionably, unsated during the raid if they had. Clark had kept his word. Saved him. Clark wasn’t the one that had betrayed him.

 

Bruce resolutely rolled up the large rectangular strip of cloth, tucked it under his arm, and with a deep breath walked out of his nest. He felt stiff and weak as he made his way through the rest of the cave, climbed the stairs, and stepped back into the manor. He didn’t know the duration of his heat but it felt like a long one.

 

No one was in the study, drawing room, or parlour. He found Alfred’s trail in the kitchen but decided not to follow it. His appetite was still on hiatus as his hormones slowly settled but he knew the weakness in his limbs was due to the minimal amount of sustenance he had consumed the last few days. It was late and no matter what he did he wouldn’t be fit for patrol that night, but he could kick start his system into feeling normal again.

 

Feeling normal was all he wanted right then.

 

Sane. Safe. Familiar.

 

He opened the fridge, fumbled through a confusing collection of ingredients, and finally found a pack of bacon. It took another few minutes to locate a pan, splash some oil onto it, and twist the correct nob on the stove. The bacon sizzled and spat as it cooked.

 

It wouldn’t be long before everyone knew his secret. It was a frightening concept. He had been acting a beta so long it felt natural to be regarded as one. Now, even simple social interactions would change; the way he was expected to talk, walk, and dress would be different; as well as who he was acceptably allowed to socialise with and how. Bruce Wayne would no longer be the eccentric billionaire able to slip unnoticed out of a party, or a man trying to get people to throw money into a charity; he would be an unbound high level omega in high society with billions in the bank for whoever could bond him. A prize.

 

But he needed to think about closer obstacles.

 

About the charges against him, about getting access to his inheritance, and Clark.

 

The cape was under his arm; heavy, smooth, and still smelling slightly of the alpha. The scent was old, stale, and almost lost within his own stench; but it was there. A broad brazen bodily fragrance spliced with an almost undetectable dash of alien; like the first hint of a sunset at the edge of a cloudless sky. It wasn’t a particularly interesting scent, especially not as far as alphas were concerned, but it was familiar and warmly reassuring in a way he had never noticed before.

 

Strong. Safe. Alpha.

 

“Master Bruce.”

 

The butler approached, looked down at the blackened strips of bacon, and gently pried the frying pan from his hand.

 

“If you would like something to eat, sir, you need only ask.”

 

He shuffled silently aside and watched as the man removed the ruined meat, tipped the excess oil down the sink, and lowered the temperature on the hot plate dial.

 

“It’s a bit late in the evening for bacon and eggs,” the man said as he worked. “But if you would like…”

 

“I’m not hungry. I just need to eat.”

 

“Of course, sir.” He flicked the hotplate off. “I have some lamb shanks in the oven if you are willing to wait an hour.”

 

He grunted his acquiescence and moved back to settle into one of the chairs surrounding the kitchen table. Alfred cleaned up and nodded towards the cape. “What do you wish done with that?”

 

Bruce put it on the table and stared at the rich red emblazed with the simple iconic symbol. “Clean it,” he muttered. “I’ll take it when I go into the Watchtower to give my report.”

 

“Very good. Master Richard is insisting on helping me with the laundry. I’ll make sure it makes it into the next load.”

 

A long pause.

 

Bruce rubbed his forehead. “What’s the story Alfred?”

 

A slow sigh. “Gordon isn’t filing the report for another few days but your assets have been frozen until the courts can determine what you can keep and what will be put on hold.”

 

“How much of my money is inheritance?”

 

“Most of it, sir.”

 

He grimaced. “I assume I will also be charged with illegal documentation.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“What’s the usual fine for that?”

 

The man moved to sit down opposite him with a pained look. “Much less than they’ll likely ask you to pay. They know your wealth, your status, and will likely seek to make an example out of you.”

 

Quietly. “Should I call my lawyers?”

 

“I would strongly advise that you do.”

 

He waited a moment before asking the next question. “Will you pay for them?”

 

“No.”

 

“I’ll pay you back in triple, Alfred.”

 

“I’m sure you would, sir, but my accounts have also been frozen.”

 

He blinked. “Gordon did that? I’m the one that committed the crime!”

 

“And I signed all your paperwork before you turned eighteen.”

 

The meaning of those words settled on him like a wet blanket. “They’re going after you too.”

 

Alfred smiled thinly and folded his hands on the table before him. “Don’t worry about me, sir. I imagine I will be all but forgotten in the wake of the media storm that will follow you.”

 

Bruce stared at him desolately.

 

“I can simply plead guilty and pay the fine,” Alfred assured him. “For you, it will be tricker. You received substantial monetary gain and have over two and half decades of illegal papers signed as an independent adult.” He paused for emphasis. “You are also going to be asked to surrender your inheritance and that is the more urgent issue. If you’re found guilty the likelihood that you’ll be able to get your hands on that money without an alpha is low. It already goes against the norm to give an omega family money and you’re asking for it after committing a crime.” A long pause. “This is why I strongly suggest getting your lawyers behind you.”

 

Bruce stared at him. “How?”

 

“Master Richard still has access to his money. If you…”

 

Low. “I’m not borrowing money from him.”

 

Alfred look at him; long and hard. “He did the only thing either of us thought to do, Master Bruce.”

 

“He exposed me.” He felt the anger he hadn’t felt before bloom bitter in his chest. “He lied to me.” Spill like poison into his blood. “Took advantage of my weakness.” And spread through his whole body. “He pushed me in front a pack of hostile alphas while I was in heat.” He spoke around a lump in his throat. “This whole mess is his fault.”

 

“Both of us had left a trail down to the batcave,” the butler began. “You know better than I that alphas won’t just walk away from the trail of a heating omega that cuts short. They would have torn that room apart until they found the entrance to the cave.”

 

Sullenly. “You don’t know that.”

 

“No, Master Bruce, I don’t, and neither did he but there is a damn good chance he saved your secret identity that night. Perhaps there was another way out but neither he nor I thought of it in time. Now, what’s done is done. He is pack and he is your son. Do not push him away over something so trivial.”

 

“Trivial? This is my life, Alfred!”

 

“And it is about to become more complicated, sir, but it is still going to be your own.” Alfred straightened in his seat. “The same could not have been said if those agents had found out about your nightly activities as well as your caste.”

 

He looked away and glared silently at the wall.

 

“But it does not matter now. There is another issue concerning this that I need to talk to you about, Master Bruce.”

 

“What?” He snapped.

 

“Barbara spoke with her father. He raised a point that I had not considered. Your playboy persona is infamously accompanied exclusively by females in the lower end of the sexual spectrum.” Low level betas and omegas.

 

“Your point?”

 

“In light of recent events such behavior will appear homosexual.”

 

Again. “Your point?”

 

Alfred placed his palms flat on the table top. His voice was even and unwavering. “It does not concern me what caste you are attracted to, Master Bruce, but it will be of concern to the conservative members of the courts.”

 

Bruce wasn’t gay. Despite everything they had done to him, despite everything that had happened, there was nothing as simply sexually attractive as an alpha. It was a part of himself he had tried to bury. Something he had hated about himself. Not just that he was an omega but he was an omega that still could think of nothing sexier than the strong savage musk of an alpha even after everything. _Mine. Kneel. Bitch._

 

Selina was the one exception. She was a raw expression of sexuality, a beauty so strong he overlooked the sweetness of her scent, and a woman who was bold enough, and brave enough, to harness her caste and make it a strength rather than a weakness. That was the one tool he had never been able to give to Batman; he had never had the courage to use his omegahood the way Selina did. To use it as a weapon. His attraction to her was born more of admiration than anything else. For her part Selina had always claimed to be attracted to men no matter their caste.

 

“You want me to date alphas.”

 

“I am urging you to remember your image may be what saves you your fortune,” Alfred corrected him. “As wrong as it may be they are more likely to award you your money if you present as something more conformative.”

 

Bitterly. “A willing breeder, you mean.”

 

“Yes,” he answered honestly, “if you boil it down. They will want to see a picture perfect omega that has done nothing but good with his money and is looking for a sensible alpha in order to settle down and have children. You don’t want them to think of you as a party boy who flamboyantly throws his money away and has no interest in breeding. Worse, an omega that is in the market of stealing other omegas away from prospective alphas.” Alfred let those words settle for a moment. “It may not be right, and it may not even be true of the court you face, but there is a lot on the line, sir. I would urge you to err on the side of caution.”

 

“I’m not dating alphas,” Bruce informed him bluntly. “Not at the instruction of an alpha. Not to make some other alphas like me enough to give me _my_ money. Not so they can all knot their hands at the idea that they may have a fucking chance with me.”

 

Reservedly. “It is your choice, sir.”

 

“I like alphas,” he told him. “I don’t need to lie to tell them that. They’re all I damn well like.” A pause. “You know I never slept with any of those women, Alfred. I…” he raked his hand through his hair. “Fuck it. They were just another mask.”

 

“As will these alphas be,” Alfred said carefully.

 

“I…” he shook his head. “I can’t.”

 

He didn’t want to do anything to encourage or invite alphas. Not so soon after being pushed in front of so many. Not when he still hadn’t experienced what it was like to walk, unmasked, out in public. Not yet. Once he had a better grasp of everything, perhaps. Once he was more in control. But not yet.

 

Again. “It is your choice, sir. I imagine the main issue is that you don’t further substantiate your old image. At least, not until this is done.”

 

He nodded.

 

Dick walked in the door carrying a washing basket propped against his hip. “Hey, Alfred, I got the…” he trailed off when he saw Bruce. “I... I got the whites…” he swallowed and hoisted the basket higher against him. “Where do you want them?”

 

“I’ll take them down, young master. Please, do not trouble yourself.”

 

“No trouble.” A stretched silence. “Hi Bruce.”

 

Bruce didn’t look him in the eye. “Dick.”

 

“How long have you been up?”

 

He didn’t answer. Instead he stood, abandoned the cape on the table top, and walked through the door. Dick shied out of his way as he passed but then followed him down the corridor in a nervous trot.

 

“I’m sorry Bruce. I… I couldn’t think of anything else to do. They were going to follow that trail. You smell too strong and your scent was all over us.”

 

He ignored him.

 

“If they’d found the batcave you would be in jail and they would still know you’re an omega. I’m sorry but I couldn’t… I couldn’t let that happen.”

 

He kept walking.

 

Desperately. “What else could I have done?!”

 

It was a call for acknowledgement, justification, and forgiveness. He wasn’t ready to give him the last two. But he gave him the first.

 

Bruce stopped, turned, and looked back at the other man. Without uttering a word he reached into the basket Dick held and pulled out a bottle of bleach that was sitting among the rumbled white assortment laundry. The painful smell of the substance scorched his nose the second he cracked open the lid. It permeated the air, poisoned the clean crisp smell of the manor, and smothered all other scent.

 

“I would rather you ruin my carpet,” he said simply. “Than my life.”

 

Dick looked at the bottle in horror. “I… no… they still would have… they had a trail all the way from the front door… I couldn’t have…”

 

Bruce twisted the cap back on, dropped the cleaner back into the basket, and turned on his heel to continue down the hall.

 

It was a lie. Even if Dick had spilt bleach across the entire study there would still have been a trail that came to a sudden stop. Like Alfred had said, alphas didn’t just abandon such a trail. Especially one which had been so obviously smothered. It might have taken longer but ultimately the result would have been the same. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t telling Dick a way he could have saved him to try and teach him. He told him to steal any justification the boy could seize away and make him understand how much he had hurt him.

 

Crippled him.

 

Brought him down to disaster with one word.

 

_‘Alpha.’_

 

A word he had rose for, moved for, would have begged for… despite everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you liked it! :D


	8. Chapter 8

The news hit the Daily Planet like bomb.

 

Half written articles were scrapped, the follow up on the alien invasion was pushed back four pages, and within the hour a special was being rushed down to the printing presses. Clark sat numbly through it all.

 

When he begged Perry to forget the story, run something more news worthy, the man had scoffed. “Two things sell papers, Kent. Sex and Superman. Since all Superman has done lately is forget to wear his cape we’re falling back on sex. You may not like it, neither do I, but that’s what the people want.”

 

“This isn’t about sex,” Lois called out as she hammered her keyboard. “It’s a man’s life.”

 

“It’s Bruce Wayne,” Cat replied. “Sex _is_ that man’s life.”

 

Steve’s wolfish smile. “It is now.”

 

Clark hugged his sides. He had failed. He thought he had delivered Bruce safely to his pack but instead he had landed in the lap of the law. He had _heard_ the police sirens. God, how had he heard them and not once thought what they meant? How could he be so stupid? They had been close. He could have heard them from the cave if he was paying attention. If he was anything close to the halfway decent alpha he was pretending to be he would have and warned Alfred. They could have… done something.

 

Anything.

 

The Watchtower hanger had never been a beautiful place. But, right then, it was ugly. The utilitarian design squared gleaming steel walls against each other, bounced light back onto itself, and filled the space with a hollow, angry, echo. Vacant ships sat in orderly rows like riflemen at an execution, spacesuits hung on the wall, and a large red light blinked above the airlock; a jarring reminder that beyond the first, the second gate was open to space. The vents rumbled as they moved air around the massive station; a low tone dense enough to feel in his core.

 

Clark hovered among it all, feeling naked without his cape, and nervously wondered what Bruce would say when he got off his ship. He hadn’t heard from the other man since he left him in the cave with his pack, since his caste was exposed, and was still plagued with a myriad of doubts. He knew Bruce could act. He had seen him transform from one person to another at the drop of a hat. From billionaire playboy, to Batman, and even small time crook Matches Malone. Clark had always thought he had been privileged with the true Bruce; the man underneath all the masks. But, if Bruce had hid his caste from him, how could he be sure he hadn’t hid other things? Other aspects of his self?

 

They were the questions that had been plaguing him since he last stood in the hanger and looked through Bruce’s skin at the arrangement of organs between his hips. At the small simple secret the other man had kept from him despite the years they had spent as friends.

 

Best friends. They were best friends.

 

And now, after the morning’s headline, he wouldn’t blame Bruce if he never wanted to speak to him again.

 

The light above the airlock turned a consistent red and the doors fell back to allow for the Javelin to slide into its coupling like a prisoner returning to its shackles. The engines whined as they powered down, wings folded back, and side opened to drop a stern staircase onto the grey ground.

 

He drifted forward uneasily. “Hey.”

 

Bruce walked down wearing a new, harder, set of armour and holding a red bundle in his hands. “Superman.”

 

He swallowed. “Could I…?”

 

Bruce tossed him his cape. Clark caught it, shook it out, and threw it gratefully over his shoulders. It was stupid but the last few days without it had kept him inexplicably on edge. It was a strange kind of comfort to feel it brushing against his calves again.

 

“I’m surprised you don’t have another,” the other man commented.

 

“No.” Clark forced a smile. “It’s my baby blanket.”

 

Bruce regarded him for a long time.

 

When it was clear the other man had abandoned the conversational ball on his side of the court Clark hesitantly continued. “My parents, by that I mean my biological ones,” he added, “they wrapped me in it when they put me in the rocket ship. It’s, um, indestructible. Even more so than me, actually.”

 

Bruce remained silent.

 

He fingered the edge of the fabric. “It’s the only real piece of Krypton I have left. Thanks for, eh, taking care of it for me.”

 

Low. “You’re welcome.”

 

His cape had been cleaned; all human scents washed away to be replaced with a faint fake floral aroma. Considering what it had likely been through these last couple of days the safe sterile scent was a strange kind of relief. The memory of what Bruce smelt like in heat was still hot in his head; the beautiful bewitching siren call that had almost undone him in a few short hours saved in perfect detail by his damned edetic memory. He didn’t need any reminders of it or the hellish trip he had taken down to Earth a week before.

 

Of his failure.

 

“Brief me.”

 

He blinked. “What?”

 

Bruce began walking towards the elevators. “What happened in the last meeting?”

 

“Oh, I…” his face coloured. “I didn’t attend.”

 

His voice was monotonous. Unreadable. “Why?”

 

“I… well, after we got to the cave I was… I wasn’t thinking very well. I just went home,” fucked himself stupid, “and went to bed.” He had been knotting his hand when he should have been keeping Bruce safe.

 

Bruce looked at him as if he could read his mind, pressed the button for the lift, and stepped inside when the polished doors slid back in welcome. Clark followed. “I’m sorry.”

 

“You have nothing to apologise for.”

 

Meekly. “I feel like I do.”

 

The doors closed behind them.

 

“I wasn’t the… the most… _considerate_ alpha…” he tried to explain. “And now that, you know, with what came out this morning…”

 

Firmly. “You have nothing to apologise for.”

 

“But, I wasn’t exactly…”

 

“You didn’t do anything.”

 

A long pause. “I _could_ have done something. I could have hurt you.” _Could have saved you._

 

Without looking at him. “Did you?”

 

“I… no not really but…”

 

“Did we kiss?”

 

Clark’s stomach rolled. “You remember that?”

 

Bruce’s lips tightened. “We did.” There was nothing accusatory in the assumption; no anger and no allegation. Just regret.

 

“No,” Clark corrected him quickly. “You just tried to when I was buckling you in again. I backed away before you could.”

 

Something seemed to occur to him. “And I took your cape,” Bruce filled in.

 

“Yes.”

 

The small query reassured him. Bruce liked to know things. He liked to gather information, categorise it, and store it away for later reference. It was ridiculous but the fact that Bruce still tried to fill in the blank rather than try to forget the whole event was proof that, even if he was an omega, he was still in however small a way the man Clark knew. Some of the weight inside him rose with tentative hope.

 

Maybe nothing had really changed between them. Maybe they could still be friends once all this died down. Maybe Bruce had already forgiven him. Maybe everything would be better than he had believed.

 

The doors opened and they both stepped out and began walking down the hall. The Watchtower repairs were still yet to be organised and outside the main passages segments of the station were dark and surrounded with pieces of floating debris. That was part of the reason the League was meeting today; to discuss repairs as well as finalise the reports surrounding the alien attack. It didn’t take them long to make their way through the bridge towards the meeting room. Diana had already claimed the best seat and sat in it carefully sharpening a new sword. Beside her Hal and Billy were quietly arguing. They fell silent when Bruce walked into the room.

 

Bruce sat down at the other end of the table. Clark hesitated before seating himself vaguely between the two. He didn’t want to invade Bruce’s personal space when he didn’t know how much what he knew effected Bruce but he didn’t want to alienate himself from the other man either. Until he worked out the new standard between them; until he knew where he sat in relation to their relationship he didn’t want to push things.

 

It took another ten minutes for the rest of the League to assemble.

 

Victor placed himself in the chair closest to the door without looking up, J’onn sat beside him, and Arthur settled opposite Clark. The others filled the gaps. Oliver and Shayera sat down beside Bruce. Thanagarians had sexual castes but they did not align with that of humans. She wasn’t alpha, beta, or omega but something… else. Safe. Ollie, on the other hand, was an alpha. Clark swallowed the sting of unease that went through him at the thought and resolutely looked down at his hands. Barry came in last, always late.

 

It was Victor’s turn to lead the discussion and started with a matter-of-fact recounting of what had happened over the last month. Under the metal exterior he was, in many ways, still just a boy, not even nineteen. There had been a lot of discussion whether or not to let him into the League and it was a slim majority that had won him his chair. Since then, however, he had proved himself countless times over and was already considered a core League member. They discussed potential new recruits, talked about hostiles between nations, and finally circled back to the alien invasion they had fended off the week before.

 

Everything was stiff and unusually formal.

 

“But what are the numbers?”

 

Barry looked up with an apologetic shrug. “We don’t know. As usual the city council is trying to sue us for property damage but even they haven’t started rolling out the zeroes. I don’t blame them. It’s a hard thing to assess even after the evacuation.” He rubbed at his chin. “Heck, do we even know how much the attack cost us? How much is the Watchtower going to cost to get back in shape?”

 

“Just under two million,” Bruce rumbled.

 

A pause. It was the first time he had spoken since the meeting began.

 

“Are you going to be able to cover that?” Oliver muttered.

 

Firmly. “Yes.”

 

“Are you sure? I mean, I can probably cover it if…”

 

Bruce’s hand balled into a fist. “Yes,” he said sharply. “But I assume your aid GL, and yours Superman, in regards to moving materials and working in a vacuum.”

 

“Eh, no problem,” Hal replied awkwardly. “If you can pay for it?”

 

“Because,” Ollie spoke up. “I could cipher a few million through the company in less than a month. I really won’t be a problem.”

 

Angrily. “I can pay.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

Diana’s sword rasped as she scraped her stone along its edge too harshly. “The man said he can pay,” she said, voice filling the space with the authority of a Queen. “He pays.” Her gaze turned towards him. “And Superman will aid in the moving of materials.”

 

Bruce’s look was almost hidden behind the shifting white lenses of his mask. Clark looked down and nodded. “Yeah. I can do that.”

 

“It is settled.” Another scrape of stone on steel.

 

“Um, okay,” Victor said. “We’ll leave that to Batman then. Do you have a plan for rebuilding?”

 

“Already uploaded onto the mainframe.”

 

“Good.”

 

An extended silence.

 

In that moment Clark could guess who had read the news and who had not. Arthur looked irritated, Shayera down right annoyed, Barry bewildered, and J’onn just confused. Billy, he guessed, had only heard it through Hal and was chewing his bottom lip uncertainly as he glanced between the gathered superheroes.

 

Diana was as telling as stone. Face almost peaceful as she continued to sharpen her sword.

 

“Is there anything else we need to discuss? We won’t be meeting in person for another few months unless there is another disaster.”

 

Clark waited to see if anyone else would speak before popping a hand over his head.

 

“What is it, Superman?”

 

“While we’re on the subject I would like to point out we’ve lost over two thirds of our medical wing.”

 

“It’ll be fixed when we fix the rest of the Watchtower,” Bruce said dismissively.

 

“Okay,” he hedged, “but while we’re rebuilding it can we add an emergency nesting room, private hormone dampening showers, and start stocking high grade suppressants, contraceptives, and alpha shots among our general medicines?”

 

Diana stopped sharpening her sword and a number of eyes flickered towards Bruce.

 

Arthur frowned. “Omega facilities? Why?”

 

Clark shrugged. “W-we’ve been getting such a bad rap lately on being an omegaphobic organisation. I think it’ll go a long way to show we support all castes in our workplace.”

 

Everyone looked at him.

 

“And,” he added nervously, “if we do ever get omega members, or if we already have omega members that we’re unaware of,” another parade of looks aimed at Bruce, “it’s a safety precaution I think should be in place.”

 

No one spoke.

 

The only sounds were the soft hum of the vents as they dutifully circulated air throughout the remainder of the Watchtower.

 

Under the table Bruce’s hands were balled into fists.

 

“It’s all a bit politically correct, isn’t it?” Barry said nervously. “I mean, I support omega rights and everything but, realistically, it not in an omega’s nature to be involved in this kind of thing. We’re never going to need omega facilities.”

 

His voice pitched slightly at the end of his statement. The smallest hedge towards a question.

 

“We don’t know that,” Clark insisted. “Most of our members have secret identities so it’s reasonable to assume there are omegas among us.”

 

“Reasonable?” Arthur shook his head. “Omegas aren’t equipped to do what we do, Superman. And…”

 

“You’re going to want to shut up,” Hal interrupted quickly. “Trust me, like, right now if not ten seconds ago.”

 

Arthur scowled. “Why? What is going on?”

 

No one answered him.

 

J’onn spoke up for the first time. “I am confused also. Many of you are thinking that Batman is an omega. Are omegas not allowed to join the League?”

 

Arthur stared. “Batman’s an omega?”

 

Barry. “What?”

 

Billy. “So it is true then?”

 

Shayera frowned and turned towards Hal. “I thought you said omegas were the breeders and the alphas and betas were the warriors.”

 

“I, um…” he looked at Bruce and looked sharply down when he saw the other man’s glare. “Upon reflection I realise I may have worded that badly.”

 

J’onn looked around. “I fail to understand the relevance of this.” Martians were a casteless species and despite his years on Earth J’onn didn’t integrate deeply with society. It was only recently he had learnt to react as people expected without reading their minds in social situations. It was unsurprising he hadn’t yet discovered or understood the social and political prejudices surrounding caste. “Unless,” something seemed to occur to him. “Are you pregnant Batman? I understand, for the safety of the foetus, it would be unwise to stay in the League.”

 

Through clenched teeth. “I’m not pregnant.”

 

The Martian seemed disappointed. “Then, once again, I fail to understand.”

 

“But,” Barry interrupted. “You _are_ an omega? This isn’t just some really weird joke or something?”

 

Bruce looked up at Clark as he answered. “Yes. I am.”

 

Oliver noticed the direction of his gaze and frowned.

 

“Damn it,” Arthur raked his hands through his hair, “I’m sorry Batman, you know what I said is in a general sense. It doesn’t apply to the individual.”

 

“I heard what you said.”

 

“Then you know…”

 

“Don’t tell me what I know,” he snarled.

 

“But,” he kept trying, “most omegas…”

 

“My mate,” Diana interrupted, “is an omega and a warrior also. It happens, Sea King. More than you know.”

 

He scowled. “This is not Paradise Island.”

 

Her eyes narrowed. “And my mate is not an Amazon.” She swung her sword up and slipped in into the sheathe hanging over her shoulder. “He is a man. A member of the US air force.” She dropped the sharpening stone into a pocket in her boot. “I know it seems strange at first, Aquaman, but when they wish to omegas fight as furiously as we do.”

 

“Steve?” Hal said in shock. “I’ve known him for years; he’s a beta.”

 

“So was he,” Diana nodded towards Bruce. “Your ring masks your scent every day, GL. Do not think it so strange that others do the same through different means.”

 

No one spoke.

 

Clark fidgeted with the edge of his cape, painfully aware that if he hadn’t suggested omega facilities be installed in the medical bay the meeting wouldn’t have swung so drastically down hill.

 

Bruce. “Call the meeting adjourned, Cyborg.”

 

“I… I’m not sure we’re…”

 

“Now.”

 

The teenager made a face but obeyed. “Meeting adjourned.”

 

Instantly Bruce was on his feet and through the door. Clark followed him. Caught up with him in the hall around the corner as the rest of the core league members spilled out of the room behind him.

 

“Hey,” he touched the man’s shoulder.

 

Bruce shrugged him off.

 

“Look I… I’m sorry if…”

 

“I don’t need you’re help, Clark,” Bruce snapped. Voice so quiet it was almost swallowed in the sounds of his shifting cape and the familiar thrumming of the working Watchtower. “I don’t need you to fucking save me.”

 

“Hey, it’s not like that. I was just trying to…”

 

“To protect me,” Bruce said, rounding on him, voice as quiet as his breath. “I don’t need your protection.”

 

“I…”

 

“I’m not your fucking bitch.”

 

“I’m not trying to claim you. That isn’t what that was.”

 

Eyes narrowed.

 

“I’m not. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

 

“Take care of the omega,” Bruce specified.

 

“No not… that.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I just want to include some emergency in the Watchtower to make sure what happened doesn’t happen again. With you or anyone else.”

 

“There aren’t any other omegas in the league.”

 

“You don’t know that.”

 

Bruce looked at him.

 

“Oh… I suppose… you would.”

 

Bruce would. The amount of information he had stored on the bat computer alone was staggering even to him. The amount of effort that went into analysing his allies and his enemies was unsurpassed. He would know everyone’s sexual caste down to their exact hormone count.

 

“But… there might be one day,” Clark countered. “And even if it’s just you I…”

 

A sharp look.

 

“We stock omega hormone shots to bring down alphas having panic attacks. Why not alpha shots for omegas? Why not suppressants? Why not a room where you don’t have to…”

 

“Where _I_?”

 

“Or any omega,” he said sheepishly. “Just a… safe place to nest up here.”

 

Bruce studied him. “Damn you, Clark.”

 

He frowned. “I’m sorry.”

 

“You still don’t have anything to apologise for. I… I was just hoping I could have one last meeting without all this shit having to come out. You know me, I just… hate this.”

 

Clark’s heart stuttered. _You know me_.

 

It was stupid - of course it was stupid - to think Bruce would be different. He wouldn’t. Why would he? Of course he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t have doubted him. Shouldn’t have thought for one second someone as stubborn, as strong, as simply irritating at times as Bruce could ever let something as trivial as his caste define him. He was _Batman_. Batman wouldn’t… but he was also a man. And under his cowl he looked like a man prepping for war.

 

“Are you okay?” Clark asked tentatively.

 

Simply. “No.”

 

“When’s the hearing?”

 

“Four days.”

 

“What are you going to do?”

 

Bruce sent him a flat stare. “Get my money back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I choose to believe Arthur goes away thinking about what Diana said and almost a year later he'll run into Mera - an omega that fights as fiercely as he does - and falls hopelessly in love. :D


	9. Chapter 9

“Go around the block one more time, Alfred.”

 

“They’re not going to disburse just because you’re late.”

 

“Just once more,” he muttered. “Then I’ll get out.”

 

Respectfully. “As you wish, sir.”

 

The butler shifted gears and continued by the turn off. Bruce plucked at the stitching on the leather armrest as the car, once again, cruised by the small crowd huddled under a turtle shell of umbrellas. He analysed them through the tinted windows. There were cameras big enough to belong to news stations hoisted onto shoulders; lens peeking out from under rainproof covers, a piebald selection of reporters stealing interviews from whoever they found; be they officials or passers by, and a small collection of grassroots omega rights activists that he suspected were skipping school in order to attend.

 

All of them between him and where he needed to be.

 

Waiting for him.

 

It was his first public appearance since the news hit the headlines. More importantly, it was the first time he would ever step out into the world as Bruce Wayne without a scent mask.

 

He would rather be facing the Joker.

 

He smelt heavy and wrong even to himself; the sweet layered aroma of a high level omega unfolding around him like the petals of a flower… or the tentacles of a monster, languidly searching for an alpha to ensnare. It was an ugly scent, a hostile one, and stood in stark contrast to the mask he had worn for years. The flat familiar mid level beta that never drifted too far from his skin. Unobtrusive. Unaggressive. Him. It was him. A scent he had come to identify with almost as much as his own. A scent that meant Bruce Wayne and fuelled the playboy persona that kept his family safe from the persecution of the cowl.

 

The amount of people that had been privy to his true scent as well as his identity before the raid could fit into a school bus with seats to spare. That number would double the moment he stepped out of the close confines of the car. Triple before he even made it into the briefing room.

 

By the time he stepped out into the court… the court.

 

It was less than two hours away now and yet it still seemed distant. He needed to step out of the car first, he needed to face the reporters, and he needed to meet the single lawyer he had managed to wrangle in on a flimsy promise of pay and the prospect of a high profile case.

 

The same kind of aggressive, unsubstantiated, promise he had made to the Justice League.

 

He needed to get his money back. Not just for an expensive lawyer or the Watchtower repairs. His money was what allowed him to feed his nightly activities, gave him the ability to equip the Justice League with what they needed to save lives, and kept alive the Wayne Foundation; the part of his mission that sought to rip crime out by the root and eradicate poverty within Gotham. As simply essential as the cape and cowl.

 

He needed to win this. He needed to.

 

Bruce held onto to that thought like a weapon as Alfred completed the circuit and finally pulled to a halt before the looming black building.

 

“Are you okay, sir?”

 

Gruffly. “Fine.”

 

The butler looked at him in the rear view mirror. “Three breaths.”

 

Bruce obeyed. It was the first thing Alfred had taught him when teaching him to act and was like putting a mask on despite the oppressive presence of his scent.

 

They weren’t going to see him. They were going to smell him, but they still weren’t going to see him. They would see the type of omega they could give his inheritance to. The picture perfect breeder that did nothing but good with his money. Until his accounts were thawed that was all they would see.

 

“I’ll be in the courtroom.” Alfred told him.

 

“I know.”

 

Carefully. “You can do it.”

 

Again. “I know.”

 

A pause.

 

“It’s time, sir.”

 

He gathered himself. “I know.”

 

Bruce popped open the door before he could find a reason to delay any longer. The reporters swarmed, thick despite the rain.

 

“Mr Wayne!”

 

“A moment, Mr Wayne!”

 

“Wayne!”

 

“Any comment, Mr Wayne?!”

 

“How are you feeling, Mr Wayne?!”

 

“Mr Wayne!”

 

He climbed out of the car, hugged his jacket around his shoulders, and kept his head down and face forward as he cut through the mass of bodies. Among them he saw Vicki Vale and Summer Gleeson; the two red headed reporters that he usually dealt with. Vicki worked for the Gotham Gazette and usually contacted him when doing a piece that involved Wayne Enterprises. Summer appeared in Gotham Live and would more often cover charity events and gossip articles. Both were formidable women who had a lot of influence over public opinion.

 

He also saw another woman wrapped in a bright yellow raincoat with a pair of sunglasses on her head. Not from Gotham. Neither was the eager faced boy snapping pictures at her side. He recognised her a moment before reading her name tag. Lois Lane. Daily Planet. For a moment his face moved treacherously upward as he scanned the faces of the gathered men and scented the air.

 

He wasn’t here.

 

“Why did you do it, Wayne?!”

 

“What’s going to happen to Wayne Enterprises?!”

 

“Do you have an alpha, Mr Wayne?!”

 

Bruce turned his gaze resolutely down, pushed through the doors of the courthouse, and let security turn back the storm of reporters as he marched passed the front desk. His lawyer greeted him formally, pulled him into a small office room, and began talking about the prosecutor, what Bruce needed to say, and how he needed to say it.

 

He heard it, repeated sentences when he was told to, and wondered why Lois had come instead of Clark.

 

It shouldn’t bother him; shouldn’t matter that they had sent someone instead. He should be happy. The woman had a tough as nails attitude when it came to her writing that would never leave room for social prejudice and was more likely to focus on the trial rather than the ‘sex scandal’ that had been flooding forums recently. No doubt there were others employed at the Daily Planet that wouldn’t be so kind. Yet, despite that, he still felt as small and unhappy when he thought of the yellow coated woman with the useless sunglasses, the eager boy, and nothing but strange men working for strange papers. It shouldn’t matter. But it did.

 

“Repeat it, Mr Wayne.”

 

Monotonously. “I feared I would become a target if my caste was common knowledge.”

 

“And?” His lawyer pushed.

 

“I intended to reveal my caste when I found a respectable alpha.”

 

“But you didn’t.”

 

“By the time I realised the flaw in my plan I had already been documented a beta for years. I feared legal ramifications and not being able to support the Wayne Foundation, the people at Wayne Enterprises, or my wards.”

 

The man nodded, clapped his hands together, and paced across the room.

 

“From the top,” he said, “more conviction, and in your own words.”

 

Bruce looked down at the tabletop and his hands sitting uselessly open on it. “I… I was worried I would be a target if anyone ever knew I was an omega. When I found an alpha that wasn’t after my inheritance and…” He stopped, licked his lips, and swallowed. Forced himself to say it. “…and who would make a good sire…”

 

A nod. “Good.”

 

“…I was going to tell the world what I was.”

 

The lawyer nodded. “But you didn’t.”

 

“No. No honest alpha who wanted to sire children would choose a male beta for a partner. I wanted to come out, tell everyone, but I was worried I would lose my money and not be able to take care of my charity, my staff, or my wards.”

 

“Your sons.”

 

Bruce kept his eyes down. “They weren’t my sons.”

 

“You’re an omega,” the man reminded him. “Maternal. Emphasis the fact that when you didn’t get your alpha you still adopted children.”

 

“I didn’t.”

 

“You adopted the older one. Richard.”

 

“When he was an adult.” He spoke with a twinge of regret. “I was never a father to them.” A mentor, a pack leader, and a General pushing them into his own, personal, war. But never a father.

 

The lawyer sighed heavily. “No. Not officially. But you felt for them. You took care of them. You loved them, nurtured them, and wanted to support them. You did, didn’t you?”

 

He nodded.

 

“So, for the next few hours they are…?”

 

He swallowed. “My sons.” The word felt wrong on his lips. Wrong not because he didn’t care but because he had never welcomed that kind of relationship. He had never filled the necessary prerequisites to deserve that title or the right to call them that.

 

The lawyer straightened. “Good.”

 

Grimly. “Are we ready?”

 

“Yes. As long as you’re sure you don’t want to claim post traumatic stress disorder due to your parents and,” he flicked through the papers on the desk, “Jason’s violent deaths.”

 

“No.”

 

“I can make the case,” the man pushed. “Omega in distress always goes down well. There will be no fine.”

 

Low. “And no inheritance.”

 

“You’ll get the inheritance either way if you bond,” he said pointedly.

 

“No I won’t,” Bruce corrected him bitterly, “my alpha would get the inheritance.”

 

He snorted. “You’re a high level omega, Bruce. If you were my mate I wouldn’t deny you a thing. No half way respectable alpha would.”

 

Bruce glared at him. Cold. Angry.

 

The lawyer sighed. “Very well, but I can’t promise the inheritance. Your public image is going to make some of this stuff hard to sell and the prosecutor is keen to get as much of that money into the vault as possible.” He made a face. “Oh, and, you’ve managed to unite a whole host of different conservative groups that’ll be protesting in the park across the street during the trial. Nothing official by any omega rights people but there are the young and angry supposedly showing up to cheer you on.”

 

Low. “Does it matter?”

 

“Not really.”

 

A stretched silence. “If I lose, what will we do next?”

 

A pained look slid across the lawyer’s face. “Well, there are a few avenues we could take. Disputes, appeals, but it’ll take time and they’re usually pretty final about this kind of thing.”

 

Bruce nodded. He needed to win this. He knew it already but it was strangely satisfying – if not also stilling – to have confirmation of the fact. Despite it, however, he couldn’t help constructing fragile contingency plans in the back of his mind.

 

An hour later he sat in the court hating the tight knot of his tie, the Judge’s slightly crooked stare, and the ominously conservative looking jury. He could smell Alfred among the crowded observers and wished he hadn’t been so harsh on Dick. It was stupid of him to push Dick away – childish – especially since Bruce didn’t know what else the beta could have done the night of the raid. He was the pack leader. He should be better than that. Above that kind of behaviour. If he hadn’t treated Dick so brutally the young man could have payed for the full host of his regular lawyers, made his family look like a united pack, and his scent would have been among the others crowded into the room.

 

If nothing else his pack would be whole… or as whole as he could make it.

 

“…reasons, Mr Wayne?”

 

The answer came out of him like paper from a printer. “I feared I would…” Too cold. Too rehearsed. He stopped, swallowed, and restarted. “I was scared I would be targeted if my caste was known. I wanted an alpha that…”

 

“Targeted?” The prosecutor called out. “You mean you don’t like the _attentions_ of alphas.”

 

Bruce gritted his teeth, hating that the judge didn’t reprimand the man for speaking out of turn, and continued. Voice as open, honest, and acquiescent as he could make it. “I wanted an alpha. I wanted one that wasn’t just after my money but one that would take care of me and my children as well.” It was the same point to point speech he had practised in the briefing room. Basic but by the looks on some of the jury members faces also bearing fruit.

 

When he finished the prosecutor stepped forward faced the jury and spoke. “You don’t really believe this do you? This high level, billionaire, omega couldn’t find an alpha? The same omega who has for years has built a reputation on sex scandals featuring other omegas? An omega with homosexual parents and no alphas in his pack? Do you really think this man’s goal for hiding his true caste was out of a need to find the perfect mate?”

 

It was a predictable route and one his lawyer had a defence for.

 

“It is in an omega’s instinct to protect themselves and their children. My client, as you said, has no alphas in his pack. He hid himself to avoid the persecution, and public scrutiny which will attract unwanted attention of unsuitable mates. Leaving him without his money now will only make him more vulnerable.”

 

Eyebrows flew up. “That much money?”

 

“A bounty on his head. It is a danger to him if kept to be awarded to a bond mate.”

 

“And what of his public displays of homosexual affection? Is that merely to protect himself from unsavoury alphas?”

 

“While my client has infamously expressed himself sexually with members of his own caste he claims to have never undergone sexual intercourse with an omega.”

 

It batted back and forth.

 

A pendulum rocking with a slow, steady, rhythm. Slow, staggered, and sickening to watch. He answered questions in the same pathetic character he was reshaping his public persona into and watched the jury members pass each other notes. When it was over, the verdict declared, he walked across the courtroom and stood in front of Alfred.

 

“Time to go home, sir?”

 

“Briefly.”

 

The butler lifted an eyebrow.

 

“There is someone I need to see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry if I've kind of butchered any legal stuff. I hope you like it.


	10. Chapter 10

“Why aren’t you at the courthouse?”

 

Dick looked up, grimaced, and turned back to face the counter. “Just one,” he told the man and dug into his pocket.

 

“So that’s it,” Barbara crossed her arms. “You’re just going to ignore me.”

 

“I’m not ignoring you.” He pulled out his wallet, counted the correct collection of currency, and paid. The man took the money and handed him his purchase.

 

“You’re just not answering my question,” she concluded.

 

He turned to face her. Barbara wore a sturdy brown raincoat buttoned to her chin and bulky boots that looked suspiciously like they could fit a second pair underneath. She was without her glasses, hair soaked, and face pulled into a stern glare. He knew the signs. She was dressed as Batgirl under the jacket.

 

“I was on a job,” she said in response to his targeted look and walked with him as he continued through the gritty grey marketplace. “I saw your bike parked outside.”

 

“And so you thought you could come in here and tell me off?”

 

“Pretty much.”

 

He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ve getting live news updates on my phone. I’ll know the verdict the second the press does.”

 

Her eyes were narrow. “Good for you.”

 

“Trust me, Babs; it’s not a good idea.”

 

Quickly. “Why?”

 

“He still hates me,” Dick said miserably.

 

“Bullshit.”

 

“He does.”

 

She stepped in front of him, stopping him. “That man couldn’t hate you if he tried. You’re Dick Grayson. His partner. His boy wonder.”

 

Dick stared at her hopelessly. “I betrayed him.”

 

“Yeah, well, so did I.”

 

“No you didn’t.”

 

Her lip twisted into a small smile. “It was my dad that found him.”

 

“That’s not your fault.”

 

“And the raid wasn’t yours. For Christ’s sake, you’re his pack. He needs you. Why is this not just… _clicking_ for you? How is this not driving you as crazy as it is me? I’m starting to think you must have the worst beta instinct of any beta I’ve ever met.”

 

He hugged his coat around himself. “What is that supposed to mean?”

 

She threw her arms out. “What do you think it’s supposed to mean? You’re a beta! You’re the glue that is meant to be holding the pack together. Instead you’re the one pulling it apart at the damn seams.”

 

He looked down. “I’m doing the best I can, Babs.”

 

A hollow laugh. “I suppose not showing up to Bruce’s trail is the best you can do, that running away to Bludhaven is the best you can do, that never even talking with Bruce about what happened to Jason is the best you can bloody well do.”

 

Quietly. “This has got nothing to do with Jason.”

 

“No. Not a damn thing. That’s why you’re buying the cigarettes he used to steal.”

 

He held the white and red box in his hands; the brand glaring up at him with ugly intensity. He used to hate Jason’s smoking. He had even been the one to rat it out to Bruce. The kid was fourteen when he started. Fourteen. But, it turned out, telling Bruce was the worst thing he could have done. It gave Jason the attention he had been searching for and encouraged him to keep it up. Jason had always wanted Bruce’s attention. Fought of it. Would get into trouble just for it. As he got older the kind of attention he wanted had started to change but the methods didn’t. It was in disobeying Bruce that he died.

 

“These have nothing to do with it,” he rasped and shoved the box into his pocket. “They’re mine,” he lied.

 

She looked unconvinced. “I’ve seen you put a cigarette in your mouth once, Dick - when Jason dared you - and you almost threw up.”

 

He clenched his hands into fists and pushed by her. “Why do you care?” He shot bitterly. “It’s not your pack.”

 

“No,” she followed, “it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you guys. Bruce needs you right now. I know you’re probably never going to hear those words out of his mouth but he does.”

 

He pushed through the market gates and onto the street. “He hasn’t needed me in a long time, Babs. He doesn’t need me now.”

 

She glared at him. “Fucking hell, why are all you bat guys so determined to believe the world is your personal pity party?”

 

He moved to turn away. She grabbed the front of his jacket, stopping him.

 

“Look, listen to me. Bruce hasn’t asked you to leave the pack and you haven’t left. After years in Bludhaven that is, frankly, amazing. You two still care about each other, no matter what you say, and right now Bruce is in one of the worst positions I can imagine for him. If he wins this you should be there. If he loses you should defiantly be there.”

 

“If he loses he’ll think of a way out,” Dick told her. “He always does.”

 

“You know that’s not true. You’ve saved his arse before. We both have. We both have recently.”

 

He grimaced and pushed her hand off his jacket. “You have. I haven’t.”

 

Her eyes were a hard grey; blunt and powerful, like cement. “I pulled him out of the warehouse and you pulled him out of the cave. No matter what else is now out in the open, Batman is still a secret. You gave him that. He might not see it very clearly yet but he’s too damn smart not to.”

 

He glanced nervously around the empty street. No one was close enough to hear them. Even so. “Don’t say that.”

 

“Batman,” she ploughed on carelessly, “is more important than Bruce Wayne’s image.”

 

“But… the money.”

 

Slowly. “The cowl is more important than the cash.”

 

“It’s not that simple.”

 

“No,” she watched him, rain falling unnoticed onto her drenched hair. “But it isn’t as complicated as you think either.” She crossed her arms. “Pack is pack, Dick. You take care of pack.”

 

He stared at her feeling like he had just been gutted and stuffed. Like everything he had kept stored away inside him had been brutally ripped out and replaced with something alien and unfamiliar.

 

“We haven’t been a real pack in a long time,” he muttered, hating how unsure of himself he was. Hating how much that sounded in his voice.

 

Barbara spoke. “I know, Dick. But you guys can be a pack again when you’re ready.”

 

They were a pack. Bruce, Alfred, and he all shared pack bonds – a simple hormonal recognition that invoked a host of different instincts tailored to one’s sexual caste – but those ties were becoming stretched and strained; starving. Bruce and Alfred stayed close because they also shared a parent-child bond developed over the years. But he was drifting away.

 

He swallowed and looked down. She was right. Bruce was emotionally distant but Dick knew – knew in a way only their stretched pack bond and instinct could explain – that he was the one keeping things as fragmented as they were. Packs could exist over long distances but Alfred had been the one ensuring that happened when he was in Bludhaven, not him.

 

“You’re such a better beta than me,” he said.

 

Her look didn’t change. “Sometimes, Dick, that really isn’t very hard.”

 

A laughed. Hollow. Hurt. “Damn, you’re hard on me.”

 

“You’re an ex. It’s part of the territory.” Her face softened. “And you’re too soft on me. It’s my fault as much as yours. I should have found out what the DEA was planning before it happened.”

 

A small smile. “You’re my first love, Babs. It’s part of the territory.”

 

Her brow pleated. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

 

They stood in the rain, ignored by the trickle of people moving in and out of the rundown market.

 

He did love her. She had none of the fierceness he usually sought in sexual partners; none of the raw sexual savagery of an aroused alpha or the targeted – predatory – look of one. But she was beautiful, smart, and kind. He would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to love that… even if it had not been the kind of love she deserved. He loved her but he had never, would never, be able to fall _in_ love with her. He knew it. They both knew it. In however small a way, he thought, they had always known it wouldn’t work out. Even when he first saw her; hair wild around a homemade batgirl costume and eyes set in stone as she refused to let Bruce push her aside. Even when they first kissed; an uncertain, explorative, touch of lip on lip behind the monitors in the batcave. Even when they had first had sex; under a mountain of blankets on his bed, so nervous he could hardly think.

 

He loved her, she loved him, but it had been a relief when she broke up with him and they could return to the almost sibling like relationship that bloomed more naturally between them.

 

Dick’s hair was stuck to his brow and running water into his eyes by the time he sighed and stepped towards his motorbike and started silently pulling on his waterproof gear. When he was finished he pulled out his phone and tapped the screen. The updates on the trial propped up with the Gotham Gazette logo. He grimaced and shoved it back into his pocket. Straddled the bike and kicked up the stand.

 

Barbara stepped forward. “Where are you going?”

 

“Home.”

 

“Come on Dick…”

 

“There is no point going to the courthouse now,” he interrupted her. “He’s got the verdict.” Grimly. “They’re taking his inheritance.”

 

She paled. “All of it?”

 

He shrugged.

 

A pause. “I think you better go hug him now.”

 

He nodded, turned the key, and left. Out the corner of his eye he saw he melt back into the shadows of a narrow alleyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this one is so short (and not that great). I hope you like it anyway. :)


	11. Chapter 11

“… scandal that shook the city, the nation, and perhaps the entire first world. Bruce Wayne, Gotham city’s own infamous playboy, has been revealed to be an omega thus proving himself guilty of fraud and unlawful possession of...”

 

Click.

 

“… juiciest gossip I’ve heard in years! One of the richest men in the world a secret omega? I couldn’t have written it better my…”

 

Click.

 

“…it isn’t right that he be turned out of his family home. He’s an omega, for Christ’s sake, they’re fragile enough as it is and he’s never known any other lifestyle…”

 

Click.

 

“…a clash between the omega rights movement and traditional family supporters outside the courtroom today where inside the trial that determined the fate of Bruce Wayne, recently revealed omega…”

 

Click.

 

“…dedicate this song to Bruce Wayne and all you other beautiful bitches out there. Put your hands…”

 

Click.

 

“… his newly revealed omega status is keeping him from prison. Not only has he committed countless cases of fraud but has illegally inherited…”

 

Click.

 

“…the lawyer? How does an omega with no real family to speak of and all his accounts frozen manage to get a highly respected _alpha_ lawyer to defend him? It’s worth…”

 

Click.

 

“… was ruled today that the Wayne Manor and all monetary holdings will be placed in the trust of Gotham City Bank until such a time proof of bond or proof of care are provided. He will also be fined...”

 

Click.

 

“… asking the question. Who will win the seven billion dollar omega? Heck, look at him! And he’s a high level? I would _pay_ seven billion for that and I’m a beta. Bruce Wayne has just become the most desirable…”

 

Click.

 

“… claims not to be gay. Considering his parents were homosexual his sexual expression with other omegas could be put down to a coping mechanism. Mimicking behaviours taught to him in his childhood pack by…”

 

Click.

 

“… outraged, a small group of omega right activists reportedly stormed the building but were stopped from entering the courtroom by security officers. Seven have been arrested and are awaiting…”

 

Click.

 

“… seven billion dollars, and that house? Hey, Bruce Wayne, if you’re listening, I volunteer…”

 

Clark turned off the TV and dropped the remote on the coffee table. It landed with a loud clatter as he yanked his mobile from his pocket and quickly dialled Bruce’s number. As before it rang exactly five and half times before dropping to a full voicemail box. His home phone was equally as unresponsive and Clark and even tried the emergency Justice League connection. Nothing. Not for the first time he fought back the desire to fly to Gotham and find where Bruce was himself. Too many eyes were on that city for him to go unnoticed. And he could be anywhere… with anyone.

 

He should have been there. Bruce was his friend. He should have been there to support him. But he couldn’t. After everything that had happened he couldn’t make a move that might be interpreted badly. He didn’t want Bruce thinking he was there for a reason other than their friendship. He didn’t want Bruce thinking he was just another dog after ‘the seven billion dollar omega’. He didn’t want him thinking Clark looked at him differently after the hours they had spent trapped in the Javelin.

 

Because he didn’t.

 

Clark had never been more inclined towards any one caste. He had been attracted to Batman back when he thought he was an alpha full of targeted looks and deep throated growls, later he had been attracted to the beta that could shift between playboy to vigilante so smoothly he thought it had to be a superpower, and now he was finding himself attracted to the omega. To the fierce eyed creature that had commanded him in heat with all the expectation and unspoken authority of a King.

 

An omega that wasn’t like any other omega he had ever met. An omega he knew. _You know me_. And who he was sure knew him inside and out.

 

He had always wanted Bruce. But, in the past, if Bruce had found out it would have been embarrassing. Now, it would be disastrous. Now it would look like a claim. A response to the discovery of the other man’s caste. Something that could wrench them apart and destroy their friendship.

 

The doorknob rattled as it was unlocked from the outside and twisted open. Clark scrambled to his feet as the intruder entered.

 

“Bruce! How did you…?”

 

The other man held up Clark’s spare key and tossed it onto the coffee table.

 

“Oh… I…” he swallowed. “I thought that was well hidden.”

 

Bruce didn’t say anything.

 

He wore a rumbled suit minus the tie, had a line of fresh bruises along his knuckles, and was missing one very expensive looking cufflink. A strange new scent lifted off his skin; flowing from him in subtle, seductive, coils like smoke dancing from the tip of a flame. Omega. High level. Unclaimed.

 

The same scent Clark had been assaulted by on the Javelin dialled down and refined. Filled with new nuance, subtlety, and a broad beautiful depth that hadn’t been there before; smothered by the aggressive, unrefined, smell of his heat.

 

Dark. Deep. Demanding.

 

Tortiously beautiful even interlaced with the sour smell of the other man’s distress seeping out in his sweat.

 

Bruce spoke. “I need you to bite me.”

 

Clark blinked. “What?” He rasped.

 

“I need a bite on my neck,” Bruce said through bared teeth. His voice was harsh, bitter… pained. “If I have any hope at getting anything out of these appeals I need to get rid of these homosexual rumours once and for all. You’re the only alpha I can trust.” He shrugged his formal jacket off and tossed it to the floor. “And it’ll keep some of these damn dogs away from me, at least for a bit.”

 

Clark stared at him.

 

His parents had always taught him that - despite the actions of his high school classmates - a bite was a big deal. An alpha bit an omega as a mark of commitment; as an intended bond; a promise of a future together. Christ, traditionally a first bite happened on the alter.

 

Bruce wasn’t seriously asking him this... But he was. He wouldn’t joke about this. Not here. Not now. Not after everything that had just happened to him.

 

“Will you?”

 

“I…” Clark rasped. “I…”

 

One bite was not a bond, he reminded himself. One bite was just a mark that claimed ownership. One bite was just enough to ward away the less aggressive alphas and betas who would be flocking to him until this issue was resolved. One bite could give him his money back.

 

Clark nodded dumbly. “Okay.” He swallowed. “If you want.”

 

He couldn’t deny the other man the chance at rectifying the injustice that had been dealt to him, he couldn’t put Bruce in danger just because… just because he’d hoped the first person he’d bite would be the last. Just because of some childish dreams of romance.

 

Bruce stepped up to him and rolled his head to the side, exposing his gland. His scent seemed to reach out towards him; enriching, erotic, and interwoven with the now undeniable aroma of the other man’s unhappiness. An ugly undertone.

 

“What are you waiting for?”

 

“It won’t work,” Clark whispered. “I… I don’t have any alpha hormone in my saliva right now. I need to be aroused.”

 

Glare as cold as ice. “Then, go into that bathroom and get fucking aroused.”

 

He flinched. “If you want me to. But,” he tugged nervously at the hem of his shirt, “are you sure this is a good idea?”

 

“I was recognised on my way here, Clark,” Bruce said. “Both in Gotham and in Metropolis. It’ll be in the magazines by morning. Bruce Wayne is somewhere in Metropolis.”

 

“Did they hurt you?”

 

An incredulous look.

 

“I know you can get out of things but…”

 

“No, they didn’t fucking _hurt_ me, Clark. They tried to seduce me.”

 

“But I thought,” he looked at the bruises along Bruce’s knuckles.

 

“I,” Bruce scowled, “I punched the wall of the batcave,” he admitted. Embarrassed.

 

“Oh.”

 

 “I just need a bite on my neck to scare them off before they _do_ start trying to hurt me.” A pained look. “There are enough of them, Clark, that if they do decide that I won’t be able to stop them. Not without revealing myself.”

 

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just,” Clark shrugged, “date some alpha supermodels or something? Just for show. Like you used to with the omegas.”

 

Bruce’s glare softened slightly. “Alfred suggested that,” he muttered. Low. Regretful. “Before the trial.”

 

Clark shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot. “Did you?”

 

“No.” Bruce raked his hand through his hair and turned aside. “I didn’t listen. He also told me to borrow money from Dick to pay for my full host of lawyers. I didn’t listen to that either. I was too fucking stupid to listen.” He looked down. “I didn’t listen when he told me not to blame Dick.”

 

“Dick’s pack isn’t he? If not then he’s your partner,” Clark tried to reassure him. “He’ll understand.”

 

A hollow laugh. “He wasn’t at the trial.”

 

Clark didn’t have an answer for that.

 

Bruce sighed. “Have you been watching the news, Clark?”

 

“It’s my job,” he said meekly.

 

“Have you heard what that judge said to me?”

 

He shook his head.

 

“Never in my life,” he repeated the words slowly, “have I seen an omega more in need of an alpha.”

 

Clark’s stomach twisted. “That’s what she said?”

 

Bruce nodded.

 

“That’s… Jesus, that’s messed up.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” Bruce said. “If that’s the primary issue they have for denying me my money I’ll erase it. A bite means an intention to bond. To breed. They’ll like a bite.” He closed his eyes. “And more than the money, I need the manor. I can’t lose that. Batman is under there. If they find that then…”

 

“Look,” Clark interrupted him, “okay, I… give me a moment.”

 

Bruce’s look was blank. “Take your time.”

 

He bolted into the bathroom, locked the door, and sat down on the edge of the tub. Tried to ignore the mess of a situation they were in. Tried to imagine how they would ever get out of it. Tried to figure out a way everything could go back to being sane, safe, and familiar.

 

In a single day the injustice of the country he was meant to stand for had stripped his best friend of… so much. More than money. His freedom.

 

He stared at his reflection in the mirror and grimly reminded himself what he should be doing now. Tried to recall all the things that used to bring the arid taste of his hormones into his mouth. The rough alpha on alpha sex he’d shared with Lana, the scandalously omega spiced perfume Lois wore, or the formfitting shape of Bruce’s old batsuit.

 

It was the most dissatisfying masturbation session he’d ever had.

 

Forced, flat, and focused on the frustratingly faint taste of his salvia. When that taste finally built to the familiar arid tang he tucked himself away - unfinished and still half limp - and strode back out into the apartment.

 

Bruce stood where he had left him, head down, waiting.

 

“Are you…?”

 

He looked up.

 

Clark hesitated. “… sure you want to do this?”

 

“It’s not that hard is it?”

 

“No I…”

 

“Then, bite me.”

 

Obediently he stepped forward and Bruce rolled his head back and to the side. To Clark’s shame the sight of him presenting his neck and the smell of the gland there spiked the lingering taste in his mouth more than his masturbation had. This wasn’t anything intimate, he reminded himself. This was a business deal. A transaction. He was helping a friend out. Just helping a friend.

 

He leant forward.

 

Bruce flinched.

 

He hesitated. “We… we don’t…”

 

“Now, Clark.”

 

Now… he sucked in a sharp breath of air, closed the gap, and sunk his teeth into the other man’s omega gland.

 

It was like falling through the frozen skin of a lake into the water below. Or flying through the atmosphere in a burst of heat to emerge into the all encompassing vacuum beyond.

 

God.

 

Bruce’s taste was… everything his scent promised. Everything. And more. Deep, dark, enriching… and consuming. Like a black hole. A black hole drawing him in with nothing but promises of his destruction. Slow and painful. Utter and complete. Passionate and possessive.

 

Like kryptonite… but beautiful.

 

So beautiful… He reached up to cup the back of Bruce’s neck, pull him toward him, and feel the scent engulf him as utterly and completely as his taste.

 

“That’s enough.”

 

Clark froze. The cocktail swirl of sex, seduction, and salvation dancing through his mouth.

 

Louder. “That’s enough!”

 

He drew back with a strangled gasp. “Fuck… I’m sorry… I…”

 

Bruce cupped the side of his neck and flinched.

 

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt…”

 

“I know my biology,” Bruce muttered. “It’s meant to hurt the first time.”

 

Clark blinked. “Is it?”

 

“Not for you,” Bruce stepped by him and slummed down on the sofa. Dropped his hand.

 

Imprinted on his neck, framing where his omega gland would be visible in heat, was a perfect double crescent. His skin was already reacting to the alpha hormone in his bite and turning the red mark into a prominent, staining, purple. If they were bond mates Bruce’s body wouldn’t react so strongly. It was only because it was a new bite it was so overt. Bruce’s body unaccustomed to Clark’s hormones.

 

“Look like a bite?”

 

“Yeah,” Clark answered.

 

A flicker of remorse snaked behind his eyes. “Good.”

 

“I…” Clark wiped the taste of Bruce from his lips on his sleeve. “I’ve never done that before.”

 

“I know.”

 

A long pause.

 

“Do you need somewhere to stay until all this blows over?” He asked. “Until you can sort this out?”

 

“I have the manor for another two months. Grace period. I’ll get there just after midnight if I leave soon.” A small frown. “But…” he looked up. “Could I borrow some money?”

 

The question took him off guard. It was so absurd hearing it come from this man.

 

He snorted with laughter, swallowed it, and quickly nodded. “Of course. I don’t have to eat, remember.” A grin flashed across his face, “how much do you want?”

 

“Ideally,” Bruce said, “seven billion.”

 

“I can give you a hundred.”

 

A nervous look. “Could I have two?”

 

“If you’ll let me go to an ATM.”

 

“Never mind. I’ll just take the one. It should be enough to get me enough petrol and documentation to use one of my aliases which will tide me over until they finish deciding exactly how much of my money is inheritance and what is mine.”

 

“Right,” Clark said, fishing the scattered assortment of notes out of his wallet. “So, how much money have you got stashed away not connected to Bruce Wayne?”

 

“Just under two million.”

 

Clark blinked. “So… you’re still actually loaded.”

 

A small smile. “If I can get my hands on it.”

 

“Can you?”

 

“With this?” Bruce took the jumbled collection of notes. “A few thousand if I’m lucky. Most of it will be locked up for a year or more though..”

 

“So,” Clark licked his lips. “Can I have that hundred back tomorrow?”

 

A raised eyebrow.

 

“I don’t _have_ to eat,” Clark specified. “But I do kind of like to.”

 

“Tomorrow.” Bruce promised.

 

The next morning Clark found an envelope with a single hundred dollar note tucked neatly inside sitting on his desk. A single word was written in a tight neat hand across the lines left for address.

 

_Thanks._

 

He smiled softly to himself and carefully tucked the letter, unfolded, into his interior shirt pocket. There was something strangely intimate about that small secret message. Something more important than the money within or even the knowledge that Bruce had managed to get at least some of his money. It was knowing that he’d helped him. It was knowing that he appreciated it. It was knowing that Bruce had trusted him and he’d been there to uphold that trust.

 

_You’re the only alpha I can trust._

 

Despite him having no bond, despite his lack of a mate, and despite what he’d almost done to Bruce when they were trapped in the Javelin, Bruce trusted him.

 

It was more than he deserved.

 

It was more than he’d ever expected.

 

It was more than he’d ever need.

 

“Clark!” Cat landed on his lap with a shrill giggle. “You smell good this morning. A touch of extra alpha in your deodorant?”

 

 “I…” he flushed. “No I…”

 

“Oh,” she leant forward. “Had a fun night last night?”

 

“No!”

 

“Then you should have turned on your TV,” she replied with a sharp grin before standing and replacing herself on his desk. “This Bruce Wayne story. Holy Jesus. It’s the most exciting thing in the news since… well… ever.” She winked. “Like a royal baby except sexy.”

 

“Let me guess,” Lois called as she strode passed and sank down behind her desk. “You’re not too interested in the legal side of things more…”

 

“The most eligible bachelor ever to walk the face of the planet.” Cat finished for her. “Of course I am! I’ve written whole articles about how gorgeous that man is. Should have guessed only an omega could have cheekbones like that. Now, get this, there are rumours he’s been spotted in Metropolis. No money? No home? Makes a bee line straight for here. What does that tell you?”

 

“You’re too easily swayed by unsubstantiated rumours?” Lois suggested.

 

Cat rolled her eyes. “He’s got to have an alpha here,” she insisted. “Someone willing to open their doors to him.” She slammed a hand on the table. “I bet you it’s Luthor.”

 

Clark choked on his coffee. Rocked forward to cup his hand over his mouth before his cough could blow the desk away.

 

Lois leant back in her chair. “No way,” she scoffed.

 

“Why not?” Cat began counting off points on her fingers. “They would both know each other. They live in the same circles. He would be able to give him the comfort he’s used to. They’re both law breakers.”

 

“Law breakers?”

 

“Luthor is well, Luthor, and Wayne lied to the government. Ticked that little beta box when he came of age.”

 

“They’re hardly in the same league of law breaking,” Lois noted.

 

“Apples and oranges,” she waved away the comment. “The truth is, who the hell else would Bruce Wayne know in Metropolis?”

 

Clark wiped his hand across his mouth. Told himself the faint taste dancing hauntingly around the edges of his tongue was his imagination.

 

“I need to get together a story on the legal side of things,” Lois sighed. “As if everyone hasn’t heard it a million times already.” She shook her head. “Poor guy’s got it rough. Most omegas at least get an allowance and are allowed to stay in family houses.”

 

Cat shrugged. “He’s committed crimes.”

 

Lois’s eyes flashed. “Just to keep himself safe,” she reminded her.

 

“If he’d found an alpha he would be safe,” she countered. “No need to break the law.”

 

“It’s because he’s made the Gotham elite look like idiots,” the other woman continued. “He’s been among them so long and they never noticed. I’ll bet my boots they’re paying off the legal system somehow; getting their revenge. Forcing him to get desperate.” A small frown pleated her brow and she leant forward to click at her computer. “No doubt there are families among them that hope he’ll be desperate enough come to their doorstep. Seven billion dollars is a lot of money even to the Gotham rich kids.”

 

“ _And_ he’s a mighty fine looker,” Cat said with a grin.

 

“He wouldn’t go to Luthor,” Clark said. “I’ve met the man. He wouldn’t…”

 

“Once,” Cat chimed. “Luthor’s probably met him one hundred times.” A sly smile. “Or…one hundred and one?”

 

Clark ducked his head. “I still don’t think he would.”

 

“Either way,” Lois interrupted, “it looks like he’s ended up on _someone’s_ doorstep.”

 

Cat’s eyes widened and she sprung off his desk to scuttle behind Lois’s chair. Reluctantly Clark stood to join her.

 

“You can throw your Luthor theory out the window though because he’s in Gotham,” Lois added as they watched the screen. It was a live news feed taken as Bruce shouldered his way through a crowd of reporters towards the looming body of Wayne Enterprises. Bruce had shaved, hid his eyes under a thick pair of sunglasses, and aimed his face resolutely forward. Easily visible above his shirt collar was the angry purple red bite mark Clark had left the night before. It had swollen his whole omega gland, now no longer hidden for the cameras, and held clear red tooth marks among the bruising.

 

“Someone got their teeth in,” Cat said with a grin. “He’s not even trying to hide it either.”

 

“There is no hiding something like that,” Lois muttered. “That’s a very strong reaction.”

 

“He’s a high level,” Cat reminded them with a shrug. “He would react strongly.”

 

“Not usually that strong,” Lois countered. “Probably the first time he was ever bitten. Probably with a high level alpha. Or maybe just someone attuned to him.”

 

“Attuned?” Clark queried nervously.

 

“Someone he knows well, perhaps part of his pack,” Lois specified. “Let’s hope so.”

 

“Why?” Cat frowned. “I rather like the idea of some nobody sweeping him off his feet. It’ll make good gossip.”

 

“Because,” Lois said angrily. “If it isn’t someone he knows it’s probably been put there during a rape.”

 

Cat paled. “No. No one would rape him. They’d give up any chance of getting the money.”

 

“Only one person is going to get the money,” Lois growled. “The chances are he’s not going to pick a no name off the street. Chances are the longer this lasts the more people are going to realise that and become resentful.”

 

“You don’t know that,” Cat said defensively. “And, who knows, maybe he went out, kissed a stranger, and tasted his one true alpha.”

 

“You’ve been watching too many tacky romance movies.”

 

“It can happen.”

 

Lois rolled her eyes. “Show me the science that says specific omegas and alphas are linked across continents at birth and _then_ maybe I’ll believe you. Until then, save it for the horoscopes.”

 

Clark stared at the video until Bruce disappeared into the building, turned his gaze down, and hoped – preyed – the bite wasn’t for nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And... we arrive at the 'special circumstance' bite. I hope you like it! :D


	12. Chapter 12

Thirty one hours and seventeen minutes after the verdict was announced he ran out of things to do.

 

Bruce sat on the bed in the back of the bacave, in his nest, and stared at the open door.

 

Until then he had been acting rather than reacting; refusing to respond to what had happened and instead filter mathematically through a list of tasks. He had driven to Metropolis for Clark’s bite, had made it back in time to circle the streets on a frustratingly fruitless patrol, and completed all the appeal paperwork before swallowing enough pills to knock him unconscious for six hours. After that he had used what little money he had been able to wrangle from his invisible accounts to refill the fridge and make a down payment towards his lawyer’s bill, formally handed the running of Wayne Enterprises over to Lucius Fox – the man had been unofficially running it for years and after everything that had happened he didn’t want to damage his stocks anymore than they already were – and stood beside an alpha long enough for the paparazzi to take some pictures. In all that time he had struggled to bite back the wretched emotion, the reaction, to the trial. It had come out anyway, like vomit, bitter and angry. But he had repressed it and continued onto his next job. The next task on his list.

 

Now there was nothing left to keep it at bay. Nothing to hold it back.

 

He had changed all the tires on the batmobile, reviewed the GCPD reports, and analysed the evidence surrounding a shoot out. He’d punched the wall, destroyed a training dummy, and had dampened – removed his scent – just to get a few hours away from the sticky sweet smell of omega pheromones practically dripping off his skin. He’d done everything he could think to do.

 

Now he sat unarmed against the thoughts that crashed together like wrecking balls in his brain.

 

He thought of the judge, the jury, and the prosecutor. Betas. Almost all of them were betas and yet they had looked at him, smelt him, and decided the right thing - the most _just_ thing - to do in this situation was to make sure he got a knot shoved into him as soon as possible. To try and blackmail him into facilitating the alpha population and filling the hospital with babies.

 

His hand balled into fists.

 

It hadn’t been all betas. There were two alphas and an omega on the jury. As far away as he had been sitting he couldn’t tell who the alphas were but the omega had a small pink bite mark on her neck; an old bond. She had also looked at him with the same black scorn as all the others as he’d left. The same justified assurance that their idiotic, self infatuated, punishment was somehow justified because he had kissed an omega. Because he had no bond bite, because he bore no children, because he wasn’t a bitch.

 

Bruce reached up and carefully touched the side of his neck. The contact brought a light prickle of pain laced with a tingle of inexplicable excitement.

 

“Bruce?”

 

The voice called tentatively through the cave.

 

He froze, dropped his hand, and sighed. Dick. He hadn’t seen the boy since before the trial. He didn’t want to see him now. He wasn’t in the right mind frame for it. Wasn’t ready to offer him the apology he deserved.

 

“Bruce, are you down here?”

 

But he didn’t want to ignore him either.

 

Bruce stood, walked through the open door, and made his way towards the wall of monitors in the heart of the cave.

 

“Dick.”

 

The man spun around when Bruce called him. “H-hi.”

 

“What do you need?”

 

Dick swallowed. “Nothing I… I’ve been looking for you since you got the verdict.” Nervously. “I wanted to know if there was anything I could do to, you know, help.”

 

“There isn’t,” Bruce told him.

 

“No. I suppose…” the younger man’s eyes lit on the mark on his neck and he paled. “You… you’ve been bitten,” he whispered.

 

He grimaced. “Yes.”

 

“Is that… God, did someone?”

 

Gruffly. “I told them to.”

 

“Thank God,” Dick stepped forward. “I thought… that doesn’t matter. Who is it? Are you going to mate them?”

 

A low growl. “No.”

 

“Okay, so it’s just for… okay, I get that. It’s just an ugly bite is all,” he said stirring an irrationally pang on offence. “I guess it makes sense if you want to get rid of all the gay rumours and stuff. I mean, if you trust the alpha that is.”

 

Clark.

 

Clark who was safe, secure, and sound. Clark who would never hurt him. Clark who he could trust.

 

Clark who smelt like warm musk coloured with a bold unembarrassed alieness and nothing else. No subtle undertones, no threatening or deceptive mixes of aroma, and no unstable shivers in its consistency.

 

When had Clark ever smelt of anything but Clark? Of honesty, stability, and dependability. Of warmth, welcome, and wholeness… God. When had Clark started to smell good? He’d always secretly ranked the man as one of the more boring smelling alphas on the league. Nothing like the wild, passionate, _fierce_ spice of Diana’s unguarded allure or the teasing hot earthy musk that would pour off Oliver after he’d worn through his mediocre dampener spray. Even the sharp sting of Arthur’s oddly detailed aroma or Victor’s metallically muted but still targeted scent held more engaging complexity.

 

Or had.

 

Because Clark’s scent didn’t try and trick him, didn’t try to hook him or pull him in; it just enhanced the man it belonged to. Defined in broad bold brushstrokes the wholeness, the strength, and the assurance of Clark. Like a major scale played confidently in a wide warm open space. Like the warmth in sand after a day in the sun. Like a rock he could lean against.

 

Clark.

 

He tenderly touched the side of his neck. Ran his fingers along the strange feel of the pronounced ridges of the mark there. His mark. Clark’s mark.

 

That must be it. His body was reacting to being bitten by him. Imprinting, however slightly, on the alpha hormones pressed into his neck with a clamp of blunt teeth.

 

“Bruce?”

 

“I trust him.”

 

Strong and safe. A safe alpha.

 

“Good,” Dick moved towards him. “Because, I was thinking, with everything still coming through the woodwork I could cover the bills.” A small nervous, smile. “I mean, you’ve given me so much money I’ve never spent.”

 

Bruce sighed. “The bills are big.”

 

“You mean the fine?”

 

“And the lawyer.”

 

“That’s fine. You can pay me back once these appeals go through. I’ll get the rest of your lawyers too.”

 

He smiled, grateful, and walked by him towards the computer bay. Dick followed and hopped onto the desk beside him when Bruce sat down; the same place he had claimed the first night he appeared wearing the bold green, red, and yellow Robin costume he had insisted upon. That outfit had been as ridiculous and impractical but also as bright and flamboyant as the boy himself.

 

He hadn’t seen it at first but Dick’s addition to his household had been like the sunrise after a long winter night.

 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce muttered. “For blaming you.”

 

Dicks lips twisted. “Yeah, well, I think I deserved to be blamed.” A pause. “So, what’s the plan?”

 

“First appeal, I remove the ammunition they have against me.” He waved at his neck. “Be a good omega.”

 

“Right,” Dick crossed his arms. “And by ‘good’ they really want ‘straight’ and with one sexual partner.”

 

He nodded.

 

“God, they’re arseholes. I mean, I don’t get how they can get away with publicly dissing so many minorities just because someone slipping money into the system wants to get back at you.”

 

Bruce lifted an eyebrow. “What?”

 

Dick shrugged. “It’s what some people are saying. That they got paid off.” He paused. “I would believe it. I mean, you’ve made your fair share of enemies over the years and there are a bunch of people that would love to, you know, get you desperate.”

 

He grunted.

 

“What do you think?”

 

“About what?”

 

“Do you think they were paid off?”

 

He considered for a moment. “I hope so.”

 

Dick looked at him incredulously. “You _hope_ so?”

 

“It would be nice to think it was about money,” Bruce said. “Not...” the honest belief that omegas were less. He didn’t want to face a world where that was so ingrained. Didn’t want to believe that was what had happened.

 

A long pause. “You don’t think they were paid off, do you?”

 

He shook his head.

 

In his mind the image of the single omega jury member sat in haunting detail. Her neck marked but otherwise looking exactly like all the others. Condemning him with the same simple assertion as everyone else in that room. With the black belief that he was wrong because he wasn’t performing the God given duty of an omega. That, despite the lifetime he had spent proving himself as more, he was still somehow less.

 

He was planning his first appeal. He had already managed to get a collection of possible court dates. But if the result of his first trial was because of a stereotype bleeding into belief he didn’t know how he would win unless he showed up with a bond mate. With the unobtrusive bite and the blood tests that would show the hormonal addiction of a long term alpha and omega couple.

 

He wouldn’t bond with someone just for the money. There had to be a better way. A way that wouldn’t turn him out of his home, wouldn’t steal away his choice, and would leave him with – if nothing else – a shred of _something_ inside to reconstruct some sense of dignity.

 

He hated omegas. He hated how pathetic his fellow caste members were, how passive, and how willing – _happy_ even – they were to fill the role that society intended for them. To stand up with the rest of them and tell him he needed an alpha while proudly exhibiting the tag of their own socially acceptable sexual slavery.

 

It was a childish feeling, a selfish one, that didn’t take into account the omegas that didn’t conform or the different reasons behind all those that did. In a single foul swoop he generalised all alpha omega relationships and called them wrong, called them abusive, and called the omegas in them the bitches that let this happen to themselves. That let this happen to him.

 

He wasn’t like them. He wouldn’t be like them. He was something else. He _had_ to be.

 

In a wild thought born of the failure of the last few days, of the destruction of his careful set up, and despite its bitter irrationally he let it take him for a moment. Let himself, for a second; believe the world was so black and white.

 

But it wasn’t. Everything he had been doing lately had been because of Poison Ivy’s thorn. A random mistake that he was desperately trying to fix. He had spent weeks trying to plug that leek only to watch it spread throughout the ship. The only way to fix it now would be to give in and find a bond mate.

 

But he wouldn’t because he was an omega who could and would choose his alphas, take what was offered, and give what he willed. It was his body. He decided upon his alphas. Not they. They could bring him food, flash their pretty scents, and beg for a chance to occupy his nest – his territory – while he was in heat. They did not tell him when to bond.

 

He couldn’t surrender. He had to keep fighting even if his ship was sinking.

 

There had to be a way out. A new ship. A way he could keep the house, keep Batman, and keep the money that meant his cape, cowl, and charity.

 

“So,” Dick fidgeted beside him, “we’re cool right? I mean, I’m not just letting you borrow my money to get in your good books again, you know. You really have given me enough to cover it. If things go bad you don’t need to pay me back. But that’s not just me trying to be nice to make you forgive… you know.”

 

Bruce looked at him. Studied him. Thought about what he had said.

 

“And now you’re doing that thing where you stare at me like I’m a piece of evidence covered in fingerprints.” A pause. “Which doesn’t exactly make me feel totally confident in regards to our newly repaired relationship.”

 

“We’re fine.”

 

“Then…” he edged of the side of the desk. “Can I, um, you know… do the cheek thing.”

 

Bruce frowned. “You want to reaffirm with me?”

 

Reaffirming was an action performed by pack mates to re-establish a pack bond commonly acted out by betas towards a pack leader. Dick hadn’t done it since Jason died. Their pack bond still existed. Bruce could feel it; a starved and stretched link, a mutual recognition. It was the only reason why Dick had been able to get close to him when in heat.

 

Dick nodded.

 

“You’re pack,” Bruce reminded him softly. “You don’t have to ask.”

 

The boy’s smile flickered to life like an old light bulb. He pushed off the desk, closed the gap between them, and scraped his cheek against Bruce’s. It was a simple action but it brought their scents together an unmistakable gesture of togetherness. Dick’s scent was light and sweet; the unobtrusive scent of a low level beta; as warm and unmistakable as the boy – the man – himself. Bruce was dampened and Dick wouldn’t be able to smell him but the token of togetherness was enough.

 

Their pack bond was old, strong, and despite years of distance snapped back into shape between them like a rubber band. Natural. Normal. Pack.

 

“Thanks,” Dick said stepping back. “I… thank you. I know I’m pretty useless when it comes to this kind of thing but I’ll do what I can.”

 

“You’re not useless,” Bruce rumbled. “No. Anything but that.”

 

The monitor beside them flashed and Barbara’s voice crackled over the speaker.

 

_“Batman? Batman are you there?”_

 

After a brief pause he answered. “I’m here, Batgirl.”

 

_“Thank God. I’ve been following this trail the last few days and, well, I’m down at the morgue. You better get here quick.”_

 

“Who died?” Dick interrupted him.

 

 _“No one yet.”_ She said. _“Joker’s here. He’s camped out in there.”_

 

Bruce was on his feet before she finished the word Joker.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll apologise in advance for some of the graphic elements in this chapter.

“Call it a political statement,” the Joker said, voice high and harsh. “A controversial piece of art made in honour of recent events.” Words lisped through missing teeth. “My own little _booyah_ for omega rights.”

 

Barbara knelt on the rafters, cape wrapped around her shoulders, and stomach in her mouth as she watched Bruce approach. He moved with lethal grace; footsteps silent and cape stretched behind him like the limp wings of a demon. The Joker in contrast had stuffed himself into an oversized surgical gown smattered with blood. His face was still swollen, nose broken, and grin lopsided as he leant up against the vault lined wall of the morgue.

 

Bruce spoke. Low. Angry. “What have you done?”

 

“Good Batsy!” The clown clapped his hands in glee. “I’ve done _good!_ It was so fun and I did it just for you.” His smile faded and voice dropped to a menacing growl. “You are early though thanks to one little taddle tale,” the clown shot Barbara a murderous look.

 

She tightened her fist around the baterang in her hand.

 

“Unfortunately, my masterpiece isn’t _quite_ ready for you yet.” He blinked. “But I see, you’re too impatient for me to finish the frosting. So why don’t we just skip to the bedroom?”

 

Again. “What have you done?”

 

The smell of fear and blood was chokingly thick.

 

“Well,” Joker danced back and ran his elongated nails along the vaults. A hollow ugly scrape. “Everyone’s been talking about Wayne. Wayne Wayne Wayne Wayne Wayne. You might have missed it darling, since you were in heat and all, but he’s an omega too. Just like us.”

 

Bruce didn’t say anything. Continued his slow advance towards the other man. Waiting to face whatever horror the Joker had concocted since his escape from the hospital.

 

“They even took away all his money,” the Joker said. “They did it because he didn’t have a litter of runts and a dog to call him bitch. Because that’s what this is all about, you know. The _babies_.” Air hissed between the gaps in his teeth. “He’s a big old bitch that hasn’t been breeding and they can’t stand that. If an omega don’t make babies, what’s the point?” A harsh laugh barely swallowed. “There isn’t any is there?” Eyes shining a haunting green. “Why, we might as well be dead.”

 

Bony white fingers clamped around one of the body vaults lining the wall and pulled.

 

Barbara sucked in a sharp breath.

 

Duct taped to the flat metal slab was a boy no more than sixteen. His body was pale, eyes wide and wet, and mouth covered with the same tape that held him fixed into place. She could see his pulse fluttering in his neck and his breath fast and frantic behind his ribs. A curved cut sliced across his middle, dipped below the boy’s belly button, and combined with two shallow stab wounds carefully placed to assemble a sickening smiley face on his skin. The sides of the gash were pulled together with broad black cross stiches, deforming the neat curve. Despite that Barbara recognised it for what is was; a c-section.

 

The Joker laughed, thrilled at the delivery of his punchline.

 

Bruce spoke once more. “What have you done?”

 

“I liberated him,” Joker sneered. “It doesn’t matter how much money they take from this one. The bitch can’t breed anymore so now he’s free. No one’s going to tell him to go make babies. Because he can’t. He’s like a beta now except better looking.” A gaping grin. “What did I tell you, Batsy? I did _good_.”

 

The boy twitched and cried out behind the muffling presence of his gag.

 

Joker backed up and pulled open the next vault. This one had a girl on it, still in the bottom half of her high school uniform, with the same smiley face cut into the smooth shape of her belly. “No babies for this bitch either.”

 

Another step back. Another vault pulled open. “Or this one.” Another step. Another vault. “Or this one.” Another step. “Better not look in number seven.” He said in a loud stage whisper. “I got confused and pulled out the wrong organs.” The Joker stepped back once more and pulled open another body vault. This one empty.

 

“I could do you, Batsy. Cut cut and no one will try and breed you anymore either. You’ll smell like they do. Like I do. Omega but _wrong_. Repulsive. Like you’re _dead_.”

 

Bruce looked at the empty slab of metal - the deathbed - and for a sickening moment Barbara thought he considered it. It would rid him of the obligation to reproduce; it would remove the court’s bigoted reasoning and spare him the affections of the adult alpha population. A way out.

 

“No more fighting,” the clown crooned. “Just… freedom.”

 

Bruce. “You know who I am.”

 

Joker laughed. Open. Horse. Ugly. “Of course I know who you are, silly! I’ve always known who you are.” He leant forward, purple suit poking out from under the bloodied surgical gown. “You’re Batman.”

 

Barbara stared in dry mouthed horror. Clutching the baterang so hard it would cut through her hand if she wasn’t wearing gloves.

 

“How many,” Bruce muttered.

 

“These five!” Joker made a face. “I was going to fill all the ones this side of the room with omegas, all the ones that side of the room with cock-less alphas, and cut out the betas tongues and watch them wander around. But nevermind. I suppose you get the idea. They’re as good as dead without the baby making bits.”

 

Low. “I thought you said they were free.”

 

“Oh,” a small chuckle. “They are. Free. As good as dead. Both.”

 

Barbara stared down at the scene. At the manic and at the vigilante that _still_ hasn’t beaten him. That was _still_ just _talking_.

 

“Take him down,” she whispered, pitched just enough for herself. “Come on.”

 

“All this because of Wayne?” Bruce said slowly, monotonously.

 

“Inspired by Wayne.”

 

“He could still get his money. He could walk away.”

 

A gurgling laugh. “You know as well as I, batty boy, that that isn’t going to happen.”

 

Quietly. “He has a bite now.”

 

“I saw,” the clown snapped his teeth together. “Ugly. Ugly. Probably a rape people say. Probably. But it won’t matter.”

 

“What are you doing, Bruce?” Barbara whispered. “Take him down.”

 

Bruce. “You’re right."

 

The clown’s grin gapped. “Of course I am! The rich boy is never getting his money back!" A pale hand slammed down into the empty metal bed. "If he was here I would make sure of it. Cut a smile into his belly too.”

 

Barbara couldn’t take it anymore. She dropped, swung from the beam she had been sitting on, and dove into the clown. She wasn’t like Bruce. She didn’t waste time with a beating. She pinned him, smacked his head against the wall, and cuffed him. Fast. Effective. Cold.

 

Done.

 

Bruce. “Batgirl.”

 

“Why the hell didn’t you put him down?” She rasped. “Why the fuck were you even talking to him? You got the info. What more did you need?”

 

Bruce’s face was unreadable under his mask.

 

She stood and used the baterang in her hand to cut through the tape binding the closest person. Mathematically worked down the line until all four survivors were free and moving towards the door where the police would pick them up.

 

He tried again. “Batgirl.”

 

“He said he was going to do more,” she muttered. “There has to be more hostages. Where a—”

 

“I got them.” Dick stepped out of the shadows in full Nightwing regalia. “They’re already out.”

 

She stopped. “You’re here?”

 

A small smile. “Yeah.”

 

Her stomach rolled. “How long?”

 

“I came in when you were letting those ones go.”

 

“Oh.”

 

She should have noticed that.

 

Dick turned to Bruce. “Are we done here, Boss?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Heard from the cave we’re having roast chicken tonight.”

 

A grunt. “If you buy it.”

 

Dick smiled. “That’s the plan.”

 

The man turned his smile to her, grappled to the rafters, and disappeared into an open ventilation shaft. Careless of the life changing horror the Joker had just performed.

 

Barbara followed feeling sick and slow beside the acrobat. She clambered along the metal vents, wiggled through the ancient crawlspaces, and cut her cheek on a protruding screw. When she pulled herself through the open grate onto the flat cement rooftop Dick was already gone. The barricade of cop cars cast an eerie red and blue glow on the glass bodies of the surrounding skyscrapers.

 

Bruce joined her a moment later.

 

“Hi,” she rasped and flicked her hair off her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

 

He gave her a flat look. Eyes hidden behind the lens in his cowl. “Yes.”

 

“Really?” She whispered.

 

“Are you okay?” Bruce bounced the question.

 

Barbara swallowed. She could still smell the sickening scent of the panicking omegas already undercut with a strange stale almost childish note. Like a song with the drum track turned down. It didn’t make sense. Their bodies shouldn’t respond to the missing organs so fast. It had to be her imagination. It had to be.

 

“I’ve seen worse,” she replied.

 

Bruce didn’t move. Didn’t need to remind her that she hadn’t answered his question.

 

“It’s Joker,” she admitted after a while. “He… God… the other ones you can kind of understand, you know? You can kind of get why. But he cut up those kids and… and Di-Nightwing didn’t even seem to notice I… after all the shit that’s going down he goes and does something like this?”

 

No response.

 

“I guess I’ve been out of the loop longer than I thought. I might not…”

 

“Nightwing didn’t see what the Joker had done. His reaction was an ignorant one.”

 

She hugged her sides. “I still don’t understand why you just… spoke to him. I know you’ve got to be going through some shit, Boss, but…” she trailed off. “I’m not doing very well, am I?”

 

“You can handle this.”

 

“But…”

 

Firmly. “You can handle this.”

 

Her voice was a fallow scrape. “He’s the one that put me in the chair, Batman. And now he’s… to those omegas.”

 

“There were forty two people in the back rooms,” Bruce said simply. “You saved them.”

 

“I didn’t save the other five.”

 

“And that’s why you’re going to keep doing this,” Bruce straightened. “For all the ones you didn’t save.”

 

She clenched her hands into fists and looked down at the golden yellow of her boots. Didn’t bother telling him it wasn’t about revenge for her. It had never been about revenge. It was about doing the right thing when no one else would. About bypassing the corruption she saw as a child in the GCPD. About stopping the kind of pain she had witnessed again tonight. Not returning it. “You didn’t mean what you said to him, did you?” she asked. “You know the appeals could work. You could get your money back. Especially now that you’ve got the bite.” She looked up. “This could all still just go away.”

 

Bruce’s stance didn’t shift. “It won’t.”

 

“Why not?” She gestured back through the roof towards were Joker lay, unconscious. “Just because _he_ told you it wouldn’t? Just because he cut up some kids and…” she swallowed and looked down. “Since when have you listened to him?”

 

“He’s right.”

 

“You can’t just give up!” She cried.

 

“I’m not.”

 

“Then what are you doing?”

 

“I have a plan.”

 

She frowned. “What plan?”

 

“A better plan.”

 

“You’re giving up,” she accused.

 

“No,” Bruce said. “Are you?”

 

A long pause. “No,” she finally answered. “No, I’m not.”

 

Wouldn’t sit down again. Couldn’t sit down again. She wouldn't return to the chair.

 

“Good.”


	14. Chapter 14

Clark stepped into the ornate elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor. The lift chimed in tired acquiesce and the doors began to close. Before they could a hand shot out and pushed them back.

 

He smelt her before he saw her. Her scent was that of a low level beta; soft, flexible, and slightly sweet. The aroma added to with a subtle dash of omega spiced perfume.

 

“Lois.”

 

“Smallville,” she greeted and stepped in beside him. Her heels had been abandoned for a pair of tattered sneakers, hair tied carelessly back with a rubber band, and she was unknowingly stealing a Daily Planet pen propped behind an ear. It was the first time Clark had been alone with her since they broke up just over a month ago.

 

He shifted from foot to foot. “So, um, I read your article.”

 

“Which one?”

 

Throat tight. “Bruce Wayne.”

 

She rolled her eyes. “Which one?”

 

When he didn’t answer immediately she sighed, leant by him, and pressed the button to close the doors.

 

“Oh… sorry.”

 

“I saw your article on the dam break in New Zealand,” she said as the doors slid shut. “Good thing Superman was there.”

 

“The people had been evacuated,” he explained. “Superman only saved property.”

 

“So? I would be pissed if I came home and my house was underwater. You did good.”

 

“Superman did good,” he corrected her.

 

She rolled her eyes. “Sure, _Superman_ , did good.” She rummaged in her purse, pulled out her phone, and shot off a quick text. “It’s just a shame it was pushed back so many pages.”

 

He shrugged. “It’s not that important.”

 

“Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “A company cutting corners on a dam that would wash away a town if it broke isn’t important at all.” The lift chimed as it settled on the ground floor. They both walked out and across the polished lobby of the building. “Seriously though,” Lois said, “this last week we’ve been running a celebrity gossip rag rather than a newspaper. What makes it worse is we’re only gossiping about one person.”

 

“We’re selling a lot of copies,” he reminded her.

 

“Which lowers my faith in humanity to just below that which I hold in octopuses.”

 

He blinked. “Octopuses?”

 

“Or is it octopi?” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. They’re smart enough to build civilizations, if only they had longer lifespans,” she told him earnestly. “I bet if they did they wouldn’t waste so much paper on talking about which available omega octopus had the most amount of money.”

 

“Octopuses don’t have sexual castes.”

 

“They don’t have paper either, Smallville.”

 

He smiled before realising what he was doing and followed her through the revolving doors out onto the street side. The moment she was outside Lois stopped and tipped her face gratefully towards the star speckled sky. “God, I feel like I’ve been in there for years.”

 

“Twelve hours.”

 

She arched an eyebrow. “That’s what I said; years.”

 

It was the kind of conversation like they had shared before their time together; easy, uninhibited, and honest. Amid everything that had been happening to Bruce, his frustrating inability to save his best friend, and the haunting memory of the other man’s taste still plaguing his mind.

 

“You know I…” he licked his lips. “I’m really glad we’re still friends.”

 

A small frown. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

 

“Well, because…” he blushed. “You know.”

 

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “God knows we’re not children anymore, Clark. We tried it. It didn’t work. We don’t have to throw away our friendship just because our relationship wasn’t meant to be.”

 

“I know and I’m grateful. It’s such a relief still being able to talk to you.”

 

A small smile played at the edge of her mouth. “Why? Has someone caught your eye?”

 

His blush burnt. “No.”

 

Her smile sharpened. “Oh boy. _Never_ have I heard a man sound so guilty.” She turned to face him square on. “I have three questions. Who? Where? And when can I get the Superman exclusive interview?”

 

He looked around at the busy street. “Who said anything about Superman?”

 

Flatly. “I did.”

 

He made a face. “Lois…”

 

She sighed. “I know that tone. I guess I’ll set the interview for the eleventeenth of Neverember then, shall I?”

 

He smiled meekly. “Sounds about right.” The Justice League communicator chimed in his ear. He frowned, reached up, and tapped it.

 

Oliver’s voice crackled over the connection. _“I’m in New York. Can you fly your arse over here?”_

 

Lois studied him. “Got a city to go save?”

 

“I guess,” he said to both of them.

 

A small smile. “Don’t let me hold you back.”

 

Arrow recited the address.

 

“Right.”

 

Clark returned her smile with a weak upward twist of lip and turned around to push back through the revolving doors into the office building. The elevator greeted him with the same dull chime.

 

He hated leaving her when they were getting on so unexpectedly easily. It was a relief to return to the friendship they had shared before their fling. Outwardly they had been a good couple but internally they still treated each other too much like they always had. Despite how much he loved her, despite how much he would always love her, she would always be the elusive Miss Lane and he Smallville. At least, that’s how she had described it.

 

He swallowed the bitter memory.

 

Most people had already left for the night and the lift was as empty as it had been when he stepped into it with the intension of walking home. This time he ignored the stack of numbered buttons and waited for the doors to slide closed. Once hidden he lifted off the ground, slipped through the trapdoor built into the ceiling, and bolted up the elevator shaft. As usual he left his clothes in a neat pile on the edge of the Daily Planet rooftop – glasses safely in the inside coat pocket – and flew. It didn’t take long to fly to the city and locate the other man standing on top of a block of flats on the outskirts of New York City.

 

“Arrow,” he greeted as he dropped out of the sky. “What do you need?”

 

The archer looked up as he arrived. “Nothing.”

 

Clark blinked. “You called for backup?” His boots settled on the flat brown building.

 

“Not really. I asked if you could fly over here.” He looked at a small digital clock on the inside of his wrist. “Less than two minutes. Not bad.”

 

He frowned. “Why am I here?”

 

“I have a question.”

 

“What?”

 

“What did he taste like?”

 

Clark stopped, swallowed, and spoke. “Who?” He asked with forced innocence.

 

The other man leant against a chimney stack, hood thrown back, and twirled an arrow between his fingers. “Bruce,” he specified looking at the sharpened tip of the projectile. “What did he taste like?”

 

“I…” Clark licked his lips nervously as the memory of the other man’s taste dance hauntingly sweet along the edge of his tongue. “I never…”

 

“You don’t need to do that,” the archer interrupted.

 

“What?”

 

“Say that.”

 

“Say what?”

 

The archer made a face. “That.”

 

Clark sighed. “Bruce told you,” he concluded.

 

Oliver’s eyes moved from the arrow to lock onto him. “No.”

 

Shocked. “Then how did you…?”

 

“I didn’t.”

 

Clark realised his mistake. His confession. “Oh.”

 

Oliver’s scent mask wasn’t nearly as comprehensive as Bruce’s and while he couldn’t really smell _him_ Clark could just detect the extra hint of alpha seeping from the other man’s skin; musky, muddied, and too faint for a human to scent. But it was there; the uncertain echo of angry alpha.

 

Oliver’s eyes were dark in the dim night light and full of black accusation. “I saw the news this morning,” the archer began and started walking towards him across the rooftop. “Bruce is wearing a brand new bite, a pretty bad one, as well as some pretty interesting bruises. There aren’t a lot of people on the planet that can overpower that man. Fewer still that he trusts enough to get close enough to try.” He drew to a stop in front of him. “There really aren’t very many people that fit into that category at all are there, _Superman_?”

 

Clark stared at him for a moment. “I didn’t overpower him,” he said incredulously. “I wouldn’t do that.”

 

Oliver’s expression did not change.

 

“He _asked_ me to bite him, Arrow.”

 

The man snorted. “Sure. I suppose he just happened to punch a rock wall the same night he asked you to bite him.”

 

A pause. “Yeah actually.”

 

A flash of teeth. “Don’t give me that bullshit, Superman.”

 

“I’m not lying.”

 

Oliver’s voice dropped. “God help me, Kent, but if you forced him to do _anything_ I’ll have a kryptonite arrow in your knot before you can even get off the ground.”

 

“He asked me to bite him,” Clark repeated. Lower. He wasn’t in Clark Kent’s clothes anymore and despite the fact he often told himself he was more Clark than Superman he shed a lot of his honest to god reservations when all he wore was the blue and red.

 

“Then you should have turned him down,” Oliver hissed. “I don’t care if he _did_ ask for it. After everything that has happened to him you shouldn’t have taken advantage of his weakness like that.”

 

His brows lowered. “Bruce is a lot of things, but weak isn’t one of them.”

 

“He’s a human,” the man challenged him. “He’s a whole lot weaker than you.”

 

“I didn’t overpower him!” Clark snapped. “I would never do that!”

 

“You bit him!”

 

“Yeah, I bit him. He asked me to bite him.” He crossed his arms. “Did he ask you to come here and tell me off for him?” He asked pointedly.

 

Oliver’s scowled and fist tightened around his bow. “Why would he want your bite? He’s not bonding you. He won’t get his money without the full bond.”

 

“No. He did it to keep the other alphas away.” What had sounded so reasonable coming from Bruce’s lips sounded like a flimsy excuse on his own lips.

 

The other man snorted. “Really? To keep alphas away? Is that what you tell yourself?”

 

“That’s what _he_ told _me_.”

 

Simply. “He looks like he was raped.”

 

Clark’s stomach twisted. “I didn’t touch him.”

 

“Really? It’s what’s everyone is saying Kent.”

 

“Then everyone’s wrong,” he snapped. The words sounded hollow to his own ears. Oliver wasn’t the first person who had taken one look at Bruce and uttered the word ‘rape’. Lois had said it too and he’d seen the word plastered on a few online forums before a fickle question mark. People were blaming the courts, saying they left him in a vulnerable position, saying the verdict encouraged sexual assault. Clark didn’t know if the bite was keeping any alphas at bay but it sure as hell was rallying people behind him in a slowly spreading storm of outrage. Even betas had a ‘protect the omega’ instinct and this news had triggered that in a lot of people across the country.

 

Clark had thought it was just wild speculation born of the desire for drama and to make money off the story before it went cold. The fact that Oliver had also jumped on that bandwagon frightened him. The man wasn’t a genius but he certainly wasn’t stupid either.

 

What if Bruce had planed this? What if, when he asked for his bite, he was really setting himself up to look like a rape victim? No. He wouldn’t do that. He was better than that. He had said he trusted Clark. He wouldn’t lie. He wouldn’t fake a rape. He wouldn’t do that… But what if he was?

 

It shouldn’t matter. Either way his bite was helping Bruce. It’s just… it was his bite. His _first_ bite. If Bruce had deliberately taken it from him without even telling him what he was planning… He gritted his teeth. It shouldn’t matter. He wouldn’t let it matter. It didn’t change anything.

 

Oliver glared at him. “He’s one of the best men I know, Clark. I’m not going to let you fuck up his life even more just to get your teeth, or knot, in to him.”

 

“I didn’t. I’m not trying to fuck up his life. I’m trying to help.”

 

“By biting him?”

 

Flatly. “Can I go back to Metropolis now?”

 

“If he wanted someone to bite him why would he pick you?”

 

“He trusts me.”

 

“And he doesn’t trust the rest of us?”

 

Clark straightened, taking advantage of his superior hight, and looked down at the other man incredulously. “You’re pissed he asked me instead of you?”

 

“No! That’s not what this is about!”

 

“What then?” He challenged. “You think because he wouldn’t let you pay for the Watchtower you’re going to take care of him behind his back?”

 

Spoken through pinched lips. “I’m paying for the Watchtower.”

 

Angrily. “He told you he would.”

 

“He can’t.” A meaningful pause. “You know that as well as I do.  But unlike you I’m not going to sit back when he’s desperate and take advantage of him. I’m not going to make him have to beg.”

 

“You’re not telling him,” Clark concluded.

 

Oliver backed off a step as he realised he’d said something he shouldn’t of. “I’m paying,” he told Clark firmly. “The rest of the League doesn’t need to know that and neither does he. He doesn’t need to be embarrassed anymore.” A hard look. “He doesn’t need to be treated like a bitch.”

 

“And going behind his back isn’t doing just that?”

 

“ _Publicly showcasing_ his weakness is doing just that.”

 

“You don’t think Bruce won’t tell them the money didn’t come from him?”

 

“I think Bruce soaks up secrets like a sponge. Especially secrets that could be damaging to him.”

 

In that, at least, Oliver was right.

 

“Fine,” Clark held up his hands. “Are you willing to lose your friendship with him to feel like a hero?”

 

Bitterly. “It’s a whole lot better than whatever game you’re playing at, arsehole.”

 

“For fucks sake.”

 

“That’s all you’re going to say?”

 

Something inside him snapped. “You want me to say something, Queen?” He spat; the words falling out of him like vomit. “How about, the idea of anyone even trying to take a shred of that man’s power away turns my stomach?” He stepped towards him. “How about, that’s what makes him so damn beautiful? How about, I wish I hadn’t bitten him because now I can’t stop thinking about him and nothing’s different between us?” Bitterly. “How about, I would do anything to get him out of this shit but I still have to go into work every morning and report on it? How about, sometimes, just sometimes, I hate the world for what it’s done to him? His parents? His boy? Now this? How about that? Am I innocent or are you going to pull out that kryptonite arrow you promised?”

 

Oliver stared at him.

 

“Well?” Clark demanded with an alien savagery.

 

“Holy fuck,” the man said, voice light with shock.

 

He used the man’s own words against him. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

 

An elongated silence then he nodded. “Yeah.” He swallowed. “I think so.”

 

Clark’s brain reeled back the conversation and with a sickening lurch he realised what he’d just said. It was a small ugly sample of the tangled nest of smothered emotion that had been tormenting him the last few days; the same feelings he’d always felt for Bruce now flowering and infesting his brain like a weed. Bright. Vibrant. Wrong. Wrong because Bruce didn’t want it. The only time he’d even looked at him that way was when he was in heat. But even then he hadn’t looked at him like he was a person; he had looked at Clark like he was something useful, devourable, and that’s sole purpose for existence was to fuck him till the end of time. Never had the man encouraged anything more between them.

 

With Lois she was Miss Lane and he was Smallville. Despite everything when he was with Bruce he was still just Superman and Bruce was just Batman. Nothing more.

 

When Clark spoke again his voice was horse. “Can I go back to Metropolis now?” A question that lacked all the power, the authority, and the dignity of its first uttering.

 

The archer hooked his bow over his shoulder. “I’m not stopping you.”

 

He opened his mouth to respond, closed it, and nodded. He took off with the speed of a bullet. The sonic boom sounded like thunder in the back of mind. Powerful, aggressive, but dying with an almost pitiful rumble.

 

“Fuck.” He closed his eyes and clenched his hands into firsts. “ _Fuck_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm feeling better about this one than the last one. I hope you liked it. :)


	15. Chapter 15

Dick stood in front of the mirror in his room and wriggled his shoulders inside the tailored confines of his suit. It was ugly; the tie a murky red, shoes sharp enough to be used as weapons, and cufflinks gaudy adornments that hung from his wrists. Alfred had insisted on taming his hair after his attempt had apparently not met expectations and it swept back from his brow with a strange sternness; changing the shape of his face and making him look both older and younger all at once.

 

He sighed.

 

He didn’t know if this was a good idea, didn’t know if Bruce’s plan was the right thing to do, and didn’t think he looked like the man his mentor needed him to be. Not the kind of adopted son – the pack mate – the man deserved to face the media with.

 

Dick sat down at his laptop, opened his favourite search engine, and typed in two words.

 

Bruce Wayne.

 

A list of current event columns, gossip forums, and news articles sprung to his service. He scrolled through them, grimaced, and flicked over to an images search. This was better. It was a galley of all the perceptions society had held for his mentor over the years. All the faces the man had worn. He saw a benefactor giving a speech at a charity function, a business tycoon shaking hands with Lex Luthor, and a drunken playboy groping a woman on a fire escape. He saw a man standing proudly before a fleet of ships, a famous face walking down the red carpet, and a twenty five year old returning from the dead.

 

Dick paused to look at that photo. God, he looked weird young. Not smoother like Dick would expect but darker, harder, and angrier; all firm lines, critical eyes, and no compromise. Batman before Bruce had learnt to hide it behind the playboy’s vacant smile. Back when Bruce was on the verge of killing every night; before he had harnessed and tamed the anger inside him. An anger Dick knew still existed like a poison inside him.

 

He’d seen it too often as a boy leaking out when the cracks in his carefully constructed facade gaped wide.

 

Dick swallowed and moved on. He saw a CEO, an orphaned boy, and a pouting baby proving with the right treatment even a high level alpha woman could bear a child full term. But among all the others images there were more recent photos. The pictures taken of him since his last heat. Dick saw a convicted man, a speculated rape victim, and the seven billion dollar omega. He saw the bite, the bruises, and the bitter look in the man’s eyes as he left the courthouse.

 

Bruce Wayne was a lot of things. But, Dick realised miserably, he didn’t look like a compliant omega. Even if the pictures of him with his caste exposed weren’t planted right beside those of him kissing omega supermodels he didn’t look like the man the courts wanted him to be; acquiescent, accommodating, and obedient. Despite it all he still looked powerful.

 

Bruce was right. There was no way the court would allow this omega to win his appeal. There was no point trying to play their game.

 

They needed to do something else. Dick just hoped it, all of it, would work.

 

He closed the laptop, left his room, and went to wait for the rest of the family in the main foyer. Alfred arrived first, fussed over him for a bit, and reassured him that it was all going to be okay. Bruce came a moment later. He wore the same conservative getup as Dick but somehow he made it look good. The tie was a proud band down his front rather than a limp tassel, suit formfitting and elegant despite the deceptive cut of his clothes rather than awkward and uncomfortable, and hair jet black and assertive.

 

He was used to wealth, wore it well, and used it as a weapon with effortless ease. Even without the funding to back it up this man _breathed_ like a billionaire.

 

“Are you ready?”

 

Dick nodded numbly.

 

“Good. Let’s go.”

 

Dick hadn’t ridden in one of Bruce’s cars for years. The seat smelt of expensive leather and was cool to the touch, armrests masterfully stitched, and a minibar hid behind the polished oak divider bitting between him and the brooding omega. Through the tinted windows Gotham seemed strangely more alluring; the sharp spires and labyrinth of streets holding their own kind of bewitching beauty.

 

“You know,” Dick said to fill heavy silence and pulled a phone out of his pocket, “I went online a couple of days ago and there are exactly thirty two charities accepting donations to support you.”

 

Bruce grunted.

 

“Since I figured you hadn’t seen any of that money I set up my own.” He turned the screen towards the other man. “I even got the lawyers to make it official. I don’t know what that means but I put my signature on a few things and now every penny that goes through this thing is yours.”

 

The man looked at the screen and lifted and eyebrow. “Bruce Wayne needs no alpha?”

 

Defensively. “I thought it was an alright name.”

 

“You misspelt alpha.”

 

“I had to. The other one was already taken if you can believe it.” A pause. “Yes, okay, it might not have the best name and there is fair chance it will win the award for website with smallest amount of html used ever but, believe it or not, someone donated. You have ten dollars. It’s not seven billion, a majority share holding at Wayne Enterprises, or the deed to the manor but it’s  a start.”

 

He didn’t look impressed.

 

“Hey,” Dick looked back at the screen. “Don’t blame me. Most people who want to throw money your way put it into the Wayne Foundation.”

 

“The Wayne Foundation goes to Gotham’s poor.”

 

“Technically,” Dick reminded him as he popped the phone into his pocket, “you fit into that category now.”

 

Bruce looked out the window, his eyes tracking along the homeless trudging through the gritty grey streets. “It’s not the same.”

 

Alfred. “We are almost there, sirs.” His eyes turned to regard them in the rear view mirror. “Are you sure you want to do this, Master Bruce?”

 

Dick looked over to him as the other man nodded. Alfred’s eyes moved to him and he nodded as well. When Bruce had first told him his plan he had protested. He could still win this through the appeals; he could make a stand for omega rights. But the more he thought about it the more he realised Bruce was right. He wasn’t going to win this. At least, not in the time before he was removed from the manor. The billionaire playboy was hardly the right figurehead for omega rights to rally behind anyway.

 

This way, if nothing else, Bruce would stay in the manor.

 

More if Dick had anything to say about it. Bruce didn’t know it yet but Dick had a plan of his own; one that, if he had thought it all out correctly, would give Bruce more than the man had resolved himself ever to own again. God, but he wasn’t as confident about the mess of laws surrounding this as Bruce, he hoped nothing unexpected would spring out of the woodwork. But he didn’t want to tell Bruce his idea in case the man told him not to do it.

 

The building they stopped in front of was old and crowned with an ominous collection of gargoyles. As Dick stepped out twenty something people seemed to spring from behind the shadows and swam around Bruce like flies on shit. He stared in shock for a moment, ignoring the few that broke off to shove microphones towards him, and realised any investigative reporter worth their salt would have found out about this appointment hours after it was booked. It had been over a week before his verdict hit front lines and he was still the hottest story happening right now.

 

Dick squared his shoulders, slipped between the pushing bodies, and stuck to Bruce’s shadow as the man marched resolutely towards the building’s front door. With a lurch Dick realised what the presence of the reporters – and more significantly the cameramen – meant. In Bludhaven he had been working as a police officer, able to keep his head down under the assumption that he wasn’t _that_ Dick Grayson. It would only take one person in his department to look at the news and see him with Bruce Wayne to connect the dots. They would know he had grown up the ward of a billionaire, that he was a millionaire in his own right, and his days of being able to blend in the background were over… and blending into the background was an important part of sneaking out to become Nightwing.

 

Grimly he realised they would also know he had been aware of a crime – an undocumented omega – and failed to report it.

 

His future as an officer of the law suddenly didn’t look too promising.

 

They pushed through the revolving door entranceway, checked in with a receptionist, and climbed a flight of stairs to find the grandiose office they were bound for. There were five lawyers present, one of them Dick’s, and a stack of paper sitting ominously in the middle of the ornate desk.

 

“Are you sure you want to do this, Mr Wayne?”

 

“I am sure.”

 

“You are aware, even if you do bond, once this is signed you will not inherit your estate.”

 

“I am.”

 

“Very well.”

 

The process was longer than Dick had thought it would be. Bruce had to be read his rights, Dick his, and everything signed by them as well as their standing attorneys and two more acting as witnesses. Once done Bruce stood and left the room as Dick shook hands with the small battalion of lawyers all congratulating him.

 

By the time he made it outside the other man was already talking to the press.

 

“…realised even if I had a prospective bond mate it would take longer than the time I have left in my family house to form a full bond. In that time I realised I would become a burden on my pack especially since I couldn’t trust any alpha for fear they were only after my inheritance.”

 

Dick moved to stand at his side; ignoring as best he could the collections of voice recorders and microphones thrust towards them. Bruce moved to accommodate him and smiled softly, sadly.

 

“Omega rights needs a hero but I’m not it.” A deep breath. “So, under the belief that I would be unsuccessful in any attempt at appeals, and at finding a trustworthy alpha; I have just surrendered my inheritance.”

 

It wasn’t a commonly used clause but the same law that excluded an omega from inheritance until bonded also stated an omega could voluntarily surrender their inheritance if they have no intent to bond. In such a situation their portion of the inheritance would usually go towards siblings. In this case it moved down a generation.

 

Dick had been legally adopted by Bruce two years ago.

 

It took the reporters a moment to process this information. Dick watched as, one by one, hungry eyes turned towards him. Vicki Vale was the first one to register him and remember his name.

 

“How does it feel to be a billionaire, Mr Grayson?”

 

“Are you moving permanently into Wayne Manor?” Another jumped onto the bandwagon.

 

“Mr Grayson!”

 

“What does this mean for your father?”

 

“What’s you marital status?”

 

“Grayson!”

 

“My son,” Bruce interrupted them, “has assured me a place in the manor. This way I am not a burden.” This way Batman’s nightly activities wouldn’t be interrupted. “I trust he will do what is right with the estate.” Bruce moved to leave.

 

“H-hey,” Dick grabbed his arm. “Actually I have, eh, something to say about that.”

 

Bruce frowned. This wasn’t part of the plan.

 

“I…” he swallowed. “Um…” It wasn’t the heroic speech he had envisioned when he had first thought of this idea but neither had he thought there would be so much press. “You’ve given me a lot of money over the years,” he started again. “I’m a millionaire because of you.”

 

“Billionaire,” Vicki reminded him.

 

“Yeah,” he smiled nervously. “Billionaire. Right. But, my point is, I never really knew what to do with that money. You’ve always been the one that knew how to run charities, big parties, and just, well, be rich. You make money into more money, give it to people who need it, and use to it create things that change the world. I don’t. I’m not very good at being rich.” A deep breath. “So… um… do you want it?”

 

Bruce stared at him.

 

“I mean, do you want your money back? You can have it.”

 

A moment that seemed to last a lifetime.

 

Bruce shook his head. “No,” he said. “If you give it to me the gift tax would take almost half of it.”

 

“I know,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on gifting it to you I was thinking I could actually, you know, donate it to you.”

 

Realisation struck like cold lightening behind Bruce’s eyes as the press yelled a series of broken questions.

 

“I know it’s not a very good charity,” Dick told him, speaking only to Bruce, “but it is official and I donated ten dollars to make sure it worked. It does. It all goes to you.” A long pause. “There is no gift tax on a donation,” he said, shooting a nervous glance at his lawyer to make sure.

 

“No,” Bruce muttered. “There isn’t.”

 

A stretched silence.

 

Vicki spoke first. “So… which one of you is the billionaire?”

 

“He is,” Dick pointed. “Once the money is released to me I will donate it to him. All of it. I set up a charity fund for this purpose.”

 

“The Manor?” One reporter called out.

 

“The shares?” Another interjected.

 

“That’s easy. He can buy those off me and I’ll put the money through again.” A long pause. “It sounds dodgy but it’s actually legal,” he told the gathered reporters. “I checked. Omegas in financial distress is a qualifying reason even if it just goes to one source and I’ll kill the charity once he has his money back.”

 

“You don’t need to do this,” Bruce said. Voice barely loud enough to be heard.

 

He made a face. “Come on, Bruce. You’ve given me enough over the years, but this money is yours. I’m not going to steal it from you even if someone else did first.” A pause. “Unless… you _do_ want it right?”

 

For a moment Bruce said nothing. Then, with a suddenness that was almost terrifying in its delivery, he reversed the hold Dick had on his arm and pulled the startled acrobat into a crushing hug.

 

Huskily. “Thank you.”

 

“Hey…” he smiled awkwardly at the cameras, “it’s no problem big guy…”

 

Bruce didn’t release him.

 

“I haven’t even done it yet,” he reminded him, embarrassed.

 

But, saying it had been enough. Bruce had trusted him and, despite the distance they had maintained recently, Dick had supported him. They were pack mates and they had proved it. In the hours that followed he fulfilled his promise, in the days following that they stayed in the manor as the ‘Bruce Wayne’s Back’ headlines hit the world by storm, in the weeks after that life lapsed back into a strange kind of normality adorned with one simple difference; their pack was together again, strong, healthy, and alive. Alive in a way it hadn’t been for years.

 

He had given away billions of dollars, more or less guaranteed the loss of his job, and effectively made himself famous enough that he had to hide away in the manor with Bruce until the heat died down; but he was happy. It was more than could be said for him in a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to limp up onto this stage and take a bit of a bow because that's the legal disaster done. I really hoped you liked it. The next few chapters are going to be more about the relationship than anything else.
> 
> Sorry this took so long. I'm moving and the semester is starting up again and things aren't going to be quite as dependable for a while. But, then again, writing this is how I relax so it shouldn't be slow either. :)


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter has Bruce/Selina in it. If this bothers you this chapter can be skipped.

Selina broke their kiss and arched back to regard him with a critical eye.

 

“Who is she?”

 

Bruce glared up at her. She straddled his hips, the zip of her costume gaping wide, and her mask torn off to reveal a mess of wild black hair that fell in moist tangles around her face. A small, teasing, smile parted her lips to show the pointed line of her teeth.

 

“Who?” He growled.

 

“The alpha you’re pining over,” she specified, leaning forward to crush her pelvic bone into his groin in one slow rock of her hips. “Who is she?”

 

“I’m not pining,” he grunted. Tightened his hold on her hips and dragged her forward again. “I don’t _pine_.”

 

“Hah!” She ground her hips into him and slid the tip of a sharp nail from his collarbone, across his sternum, and down between the line of his abdominal muscles; neatly sectioning his body in two. “We all know that isn’t true. What you _don’t_ do, Bruce, is kiss.” A flash of pink tongue along the swollen line of her lip. “Except tonight. Big, hungry, open kisses.” She dropped her voice into a conspirative whisper. “Like omegas do to alphas.”

 

He squeezed her hips and with a wicked smile she increased the tempo; mashing her pelvis wantonly against the too hard armour still encasing his lower half.

 

“So… ah… who is she Bruce? What alpha has finally got you behaving like an omega? Who did you mate with?”

 

“No one.”

 

Her eyes flashed with interest. “Really? Well, then, who did you kiss that tasted _so_ good to get you this worked up?”

 

Again. “No one.”

 

“Oh my, if someone _smelt_ good enough to get _you_ kissing another omega then you better introduce me.”

 

“It’s nothing,” he snapped. “It’s just…” pulled her against him hard enough to release a twin set of gasps, “…this bite… still wearing off…”

 

“Bite?” She echoed breathlessly. Reached down to start tugging at the hard line of his belt. “You let this alpha bite you again?”

 

“No.” He quickly commandeered the task from her hands and pulled the belt off his body.

 

“No?” She paused once he was released and rolled her head to the side. “Didn’t she bite you three weeks ago now?”

 

“Four.”

 

“You know bites only last five days at the longest,” she said. “Even new ones. If it’s still on your neck I would see a doctor.”

 

“It’s not.”

 

An eyebrow arched. “Yet you still think you’re bond starving? After one bite?”

 

“I am,” he growled.

 

“World’s Greatest Detective, my arse,” she rolled her eyes. “Whatever hormones that alpha put in your blood with that bite are long gone.”

 

“It’s the addic…”

 

“Addictions don’t happen after just one bite and you’re not going through withdrawal.”

 

He glared at her.

 

“I’ve seen omegas go through hormone withdrawal,” she reminded him. “Did it once myself. You, Bruce, are not. I’m sorry to break it to you,” she grasped his base, “hmm, _big_ boy, but anything you’re feeling now is emotional, not hormonal.”

 

He watched as she pulled a condom from her boot, tore it from its packet with a delicate twist of her wrist, and slipped the transparent sheathe over his length. “Emotional?”

 

“Yeah,” she pushed the head of his shaft against her entrance, “emotions, like the rest of us humans get. Emotions like love.”

 

“I don’t love him.”

 

“Him? Oh,” she smiled. “I wouldn’t have picked that. And I didn’t say it has to be love. Just _like_ love. You know.” She sank down, taking him into her. “Ah, just… maybe… love interest?”

 

He looked at her. “You think I want to have sex with him?”

 

She began riding him; slow with a languid roll of hip. “Maybe. Maybe you should.” Her smile sharpened. “It’s what I would do. If it’s just a bit of lust you’ll work it out of your system. If not, well, you’ll know.”

 

He shifted under the soft wet of her body’s embrace. “I’ll know?”

 

“How interesting your love interest is,” she specified with a low, seductive, purr. “And, perhaps more importantly, what his cock and knot feels like. Both useful things to know, in my opinion.”

 

He gripped her hips, squeezed hard enough to leave fingermarks on the protruding bone, and groaned as she responded; riding him down into the unforgiving stone floor of the clock tower with a forceful buck. Their pelvises moved, bodies smacked together, and lips met in one more tongue touched battle for dominance. She came first; the clench of her muscles enough to pull him over the edge after her.

 

It was a singular climax; starved and wrenched out of him through stimulation rather than erotic desire. If she hadn’t been so beautiful, so explicitly erotic with her breasts falling out the front of her suit and pulse fluttering in the long white shape of her neck, he doubted he would have been able to get hard at all within the confines of her overt omega odour. She, like him, was a high level and her smell was strong and sweet enough to fill the interior space with her pheromones. Anyone visiting the clock tower tomorrow would know an omega had sex here. What they wouldn’t know was that two did.

 

The cowl sat on the stone beside him as scentless as his own skin. He was invisible. After everything that had happened that simple fact was a welcome mercy.

 

She leant forward, licked his lips once, and groaned as he kissed her again. “Do you want me to give you a finger or two to fill you up for a bit, babe?” She whispered as their lips parted.

 

“No.”

 

“I know what you omega men like.” She encouraged. “And I’ll take off the claws. I can make it good. _Real_ good.”

 

Again. “No.”

 

“No,” she frowned. “You’re not even wet, are you?”

 

He didn’t answer. She didn’t need him to.

 

She sighed, straightened, and slipped off him. “What idiots those jury members must have been to think _you_ might like other omegas.” He watched as she drew the zipper from her groin all the way to her throat; sealing the sleek black costume and leaving her body exhibited but not explicit in the formfitting design. “Seriously though,” she continued. “That whole business was fucking moronic. It’s like we’re living in Pride and Prejudice or something. Telling us we omegas got to wear frilly collars, bow our heads, and get bonded off to nice alphas that can take care of us.” She made a face. “I’m glad your boy told them where to put it.”

 

“So am I.”

 

A laugh. “I bet. You did well with that one.”

 

He tucked himself away, grabbed his belt, and began putting Batman back together. “I’m not really a father to him.”

 

“No? Funny thing to do; adopting him I mean.”

 

“It’s not so simple.”

 

She shrugged. “Maybe not, but he was a son to you when he set up that whole secret charity feed and gave you all your money back.”

 

He didn’t answer. Reattached his cape and pulled his cowl over his face. Once he was fully dressed she stepped towards him, ran a claw tipped finger along his shoulders. “Mmm, you are too fucking gorgeous. Whoever he is I’m envious.”

 

Clark. Strong. Safe. Alpha. A combination that shouldn’t exist. That didn’t make sense. That had to be a lie. But… it was Clark. It couldn’t be a lie. Clark didn’t lie. Couldn’t even when he tried to.

 

An alpha that had met him in heat and hadn’t touched him, that had bit him and stepped back when he told him to, that would never ask him to kneel.

 

“I’m not fucking him,” he said. Wasn’t sure if he was telling her or himself.

 

Her lips curved knowingly. “Never mind then. I’ll pity him instead.” She turned and walked to the edge of the belltower, stepped onto a gargoyle, and smiled over her shoulder. “You can catch me again, Batman. Anytime.” She winked and left with a crack of her whip.

 

He finished the rest of patrol fighting off the idea of the other man, returned to the cave to work through a case on the computer, and went to bed still plagued with the suggestion Selina had slipped into his mind. Clark. A god among men. Superman. One of his greatest allies. His best friend. An alpha that had already proved he was better than the others. A man with eyes so blue they burnt. Beautiful. Bruce had always known the other man was beautiful but he had never considered it before. Never stopped to ponder the line of his jaw, the chiselled shape of his cheekbones, or the curve of his lip. The lazy half smiles, the slight Midwestern accent that would slip into his speech when they were alone, or undying undeniable goodness that seemed to come from him like light from a sun. Clark. All the beauty that was in Clark.

 

He reached up and stroked his fingers down the side of his neck. Smooth. Unmarked.

 

“Damn it,” he hissed and rolled over in bed. “Damn it.”

 

The following day wasn’t any easier. Neither was the one after that.

 

He was sitting numbly behind his computer in his study when Alfred intervened. “Master Bruce?”

 

“Alfred.” He muttered in response.

 

“If I might observe you have been quite dejected of late,” the man continued. “Considering your recent triumph I find this a strange state of affairs.”

 

His response was automatic. “I’m fine.”

 

“I’m sure,” the beta said tirelessly. “But, perhaps in the wake of your victory against our city’s legal system, might I suggest it time to take the next step?”

 

He looked up. “What next step?”

 

“You need to decide who Bruce Wayne is now.”

 

A long pause. “He’s an omega now.”

 

Alfred lifted his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

 

He sighed. “Bruce Wayne was only a public figure because I needed to remove suspicion from my name, Alfred. No one would suspect that buffoon to be Batman. No one would suspect an omega either.” He looked down. “It’s all the same.”

 

“A lot of people won’t but not everyone is so blind,” the butler insisted and dropped a piece of card on the table. “With the world’s eyes open to you now, sir, I would advise you don’t give them any reason to suspect who you truly are.”

 

“They won’t.”

 

“Beyond this,” Alfred pressed. “If you wish the Wayne Foundation to continue you need a public persona.”

 

He picked up the card, turned it over, and read what was printed on the other side. It was an invitation to a charity ball. The fourth since Dick had given him his fortune back. “You want me to go get groped by some rich alphas to prove I’m not Batman?”

 

“Actually sir, I was suggesting quite the opposite.”

 

He lifted an eyebrow.

 

“You won,” the man said, “and now you’re avoiding the public eye like it’s the plague. I am merely suggesting it might be time to re-enter high society.”

 

He frowned. “As what? That pathetic mess that appeared in front of the court?”

 

“If you so desire.”

 

He rubbed his brow. “They know I’m an omega now, Alfred. I can’t be anything else.”

 

“They know you’re an omega. That’s all you know.” He picked the invite out of Bruce’s fingers. “Bruce Wayne, the billionaire beta playboy, worked well. Batman was safe. That mask is gone now, sir. But I do not think it obsolete.”

 

A harsh bark of laughter. “What do you want me to do? Parade in there just like I used to with omegas hanging off my arms? I want people to donate to my charity not convince the church that homosexuality is hereditary.”

 

“No sir, not omegas.”

 

Bruce stopped as the meaning of the other man’s words hit home. It would be easy - the same routine he had performed a million times before - and would rid him of the need to present himself as the conservative omega he had struggled to be for the sake of his inheritance.

 

Alfred was right. He needed to start reconstructing the events that wound fund and support the Wayne Foundation and to do that he needed to appear in public and throw some money around. Beyond that, he needed a distraction. Something to think about that wasn’t a blue eyed alien.

 

“Very well,” he said. “Tell them I’ll attend and organise some company for me.”

 

The man smiled. “Very good sir.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I hoped you liked it. :)
> 
> I'm sorry this chapter is both late and shorter than usual. Real life got really busy really quickly.
> 
> Also, this chapter wasn't in the original plan but I felt Bruce needed something just to establish his state of mind at this point in time and Selina was more than willing to help. I'm not sure if I should tag their relationship though as it is such a minor part in this.
> 
> The next chapter will be from Clark's POV and longer. I hope you enjoy.


	17. Chapter 17

“…should have known all along.”

 

“How could we have?”

 

The man’s lips stretched into a toothy smile. “It is obvious, Kent. His branding beauty, heightened sexuality, and frivolous nature. It says something about our society that we all accepted such an apparent omega was a beta just because that’s what our noses told us.” Lex took a mouthful of his drink. “He hid in plain sight.”

 

Clark looked down and pushed his glasses up his nose. “I-I suppose he did.”

 

As always the other man didn’t look him in the eye as he spoke again. “Usually an omega is reined in before they get so out of control, I concede, but that is to be expected from a pack without an alpha. Even so I am ashamed not to have realised.”

 

“I suppose if—”

 

“He dropped out of the Academy when… I was eighteen so he would have been fourteen. That must have been when he presented.”

 

“I didn’t know you two went to school together.”

 

“Yes, we both attended the same private school for a time. You would not know of it. It is quite expensive for the most part.” His lip curled. “My father gave me money for the school fees. Little did he know I attended for free. Students of substantial intellect did, you understand. In Wayne’s case it was, obviously, his wealth that won him placement.”

 

“Yes.” Clark scribbled Hitler’s moustache on the upper lip of the doodle he was drawing of the preening alpha. “Speaking of his wealth…”

 

“The recovery of his fortunate is peripheral,” Lex continued uninhibited. “The real issue is what happens next.” His smile grew wider. “There is an unclaimed omega in high society; the sole heir of an old elite family who we know is still having heats. That has the potential to change things.”

 

The potential to legitimise new money, Clark silently translated.

 

Bruce didn’t have a title but he was still practically royalty; the prestige of his family extending back to the founding of Gotham. Lex Luthor, in comparison, was still new money. He had everything – was richer than Bruce – but still lacked the open invitation to the inner sanctum of high society having a mate with the name Wayne would buy. Lex, like all the other rich alphas that had secured last minute invitations to the ball, came with a goal in mind; one man.

 

It was Bruce Wayne’s re-emergence into society. Once it became public knowledge that the man had accepted the invitation for the fundraiser the attendance had almost doubled, media from every outlet vied for the right to attend, and among it all somehow Perry had won him a spot on the list. His suit was stamped with a reporter ID card, phone removed, and he had been sternly told not to touch any of the food or drink. Despite it he was one of the few people who had made a donation.

 

“That will be all for now, Kent.” Lex said. “I am sure your article will be amusing.”

 

“Thank you. You’ve been…” he looked at the page in his notebook. A shopping list, a doodle of Lex looking like a comic book super villain, and the first ninety two numbers of Pi. “…very helpful.”

 

The billionaire picked up his drink and moved back into the foray of people. Clark turned a new page in his notebook and did the same. They were in a large private park that rested before an ominous historical courthouse. Most of the area had been roped off, the bounties protected by stern face security, and a large paved area set aside for dancing and dinner.

 

Among the business men, heiresses, and scattered celebrities, he saw Oliver Queen; his blonde hair and lightly tanned skin somehow offensively out of place in the stark colour palate around them. The man caught his eye and quickly looked aside. They hadn’t seen each other since the night they met on the rooftops outside New York and the weight of what he’d admitted to the other man hung between them; awkward, heavy, and still grossly undefined.

 

Clark swallowed and looked away. He didn’t want to think about Oliver, what he’d told him about Bruce, or any of it. The world hadn’t been right since Bruce went into heat in front of him, since the society he had trusted turned on his best friend… since Bruce tried to kiss him. That was the moment. The moment everything he had been keeping locked away inside himself started to come out. Oliver had been the one to make him acknowledge it but it was a storm of feelings he had been holding onto, been suppressing, for a long time now.

 

He turned to the nearest person and with a forced smile asked for an interview. They complied. He managed to collect a few quotes from prestigious members before the man arrived. When he did, however, Clark knew he wouldn’t have enough room in the article to include them.

 

He didn’t know what he expected.

 

He doubted anyone did.

 

But it hadn’t been what stepped out of the sleek black car that pulled up at the door.

 

It was Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy. The same man he had always been.

 

Omegas in formal society were usually dressed beautifully if not conservatively, typically kept their necks hidden behind a high collars, and often came on the arm of either family member or a potential mate. They were also politely attention shy.

 

Bruce Wayne kicked open the door before his driver could make it and staggered onto the red carpet with a wide airy grin, a half empty bottle of champagne in one hand, and a crumbled invitation in the other. His silk shirt hung open to his sternum, hair tousled, and eyes glittered.

 

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said to the swarm of photographers massing behind the lines, “but I started the party early.”

 

To everyone’s obvious shock two men climbed out of the car after him and attached themselves to his arms.

 

It wasn’t unusual for Bruce Wayne to bring a couple of dates. Usually they were models, usually they were omegas, and always were they female. But, apparently revelling in the discovery of his sexual caste, Bruce Wayne walked down the red carpet with two alpha males hanging off his arms with all the reverence of bought omegas.

 

Clark heard Oliver mutter under his breath. “Son of a gun.”

 

Most among the socialites stared at the display with obvious offence. Some turned away, one laughed uncertainly, and a few blinked owlishly as Bruce gave the champagne to the doorman upon his entry and blandly waved away the stuttering welcome.

 

The paparazzi swarmed from the red carpet, abandoning a white faced couple, to continue collecting pictures of Bruce from behind the makeshift barrier that divided the charity ball from the rest of the world.

 

“Your honour!” Bruce cried, spotting the judge once he was through to the main party. “I haven’t seen you since you sentenced me. Nice work on that, by the way. It’s good to know your sense of justice isn’t compromised by money.”

 

The woman’s face was livid. “You assume too much, Mr Wayne.”

 

He ignored her and ploughed onto greet a frightened looking woman, then a man who refused to shake his hand, another that did so reluctantly, and a third that gallantly offered him a glass of drink. Bruce took it, sipped once, and gave it to one of the alphas tailing him in a perfect mirror image of Gotham City's district attorney's infamous treatment of his omega wife. This stirred a murmur of uncertain laughter from the gathered elite.

 

Gradually the novelty seemed to fade and the party subtly divided into two; those that stood at a distance and shared snide and outraged comments, and those that seemed to tolerate if not wholly accept the eccentric omega in their midst. As the night wore on a few of the younger people approached him and, with obvious amusement, complimented his alphas as they used to his omegas. A bold young girl requested a dance with the more attractive of the two and Bruce sent the second for more drinks. Taking the opportunity, a collection of alphas quickly moved in and started showering the man in compliments, Lex among them.

 

Even under all this scandal, he was still a prize.

 

For his part Bruce sank into his newfound omega role and diligently accepted the flattery with a wide vague smile. His eyes never rested on any single suitor for too long nor did he return their attentions. Some more enterprising ones had done their maths and were bringing him food instead of drinks. Omegas had a greater appetite during the low points in their cycle; a survival mechanism to make up for the weight lost during their heats. An alpha giving an omega food in this time sent a very simple message; I provide. Bruce accepted these gifts more readily but still didn’t afford the suitors more than a passing look.

 

Clark tried to stop listening in and huddled at the back of the party; feeling like an intruder hiding in the closet and yet terrified for reasons he couldn’t wholly explain.

 

“…a disgrace. They’re probably sex workers and he brought them here?”

 

“…thought he was supposed to be gay?”

 

“…Grayson? The son. I thought he would come with him.”

 

“…find out where he found those alphas. They’re prettier than he is.”

 

“…in my life seen such behaviour!”

 

“…same as before. I suppose personality does over shadow caste after all.”

 

“…God he’s good looking. I wish I was an alpha.”

 

“…lied in court. Disgraceful! He should be charged again.”

 

“…told you I would pay for it.” Bruce’s voice undercut the others. A strong, angry, baritone.

 

Clark looked up. Bruce and Oliver stood away from the crowd. Their heads were together, bodies close, and the omega’s fingers plucked suggestively at the buttons on the front of the archer’s suit. Bruce leant forward, looking for all the world like he was drunkenly flirting with the other man, and spoke again. Spoke in Batman’s voice low enough to be inaudible to anyone other than the man before him… and Clark.

 

“You will find two million returned to your accounts before the end of the week. Do not go behind my back again.”

 

Oliver struggled to keep his own false smile in place. “But… Bruce…”

 

“If you inform anyone else on the league of this I will break your damn bow.”

 

“I… I might have already.”

 

Bruce’s façade shivered for a moment then he laughed, loud and clear, before leaning in closer again. Angrily. “Who?”

 

Oliver’s eyes flickered around the room, didn’t find him.

 

“Who?” Bruce hissed.

 

“Just Clark.”

 

A pause.

 

“He won’t… he, um, cares about you, you know.”

 

“He’s my friend,” Bruce said simply.

 

Oliver shifted. “Friend?”

 

“What did…?” Bruce’s eyes flashed as Lex pushed away from the other crowd and approached. “…never noticed you had green eyes before,” he purred as the other alpha moved into earshot. “I like green eyes.”

 

“I also have green eyes,” Lex said. “But yours are far more striking, Mr Wayne.”

 

Bruce laughed and pushed the archer away a little harder than necessary. “Luthor,” he said, took the offered drink, and shrugged off the hand that tried to wrap around his hip. “You’re such a dog.” Clark took one look at the glass, at the particles inside it, and barged forward.

 

“E-excuse me. I’m sorry. Pardon me.” He sidestepped a kissing couple, cut through a gathered group of betas, and stepped forward to knock into Bruce in a feigned stumble. The wine glass dropped from the other man’s hand and smashed on the pavement.

 

“Oh my, I’m terribly sorry Mr Wayne.”

 

Bruce stared at him in shock. “You…” It wasn’t a question, a realisation, or explanation.

 

He smiled uncertainly. “Me, Mr Wayne?”

 

“I…” Bruce blinked. “I thought Miss Lane was the reporter your paper had following me around.”

 

“She was. She refuses to report on you anymore. Gave a big speech about the difference between news and gossip and what kind of reporter she is.”

 

“I would like to have heard it.” He blinked, eyes losing that bright spark of intelligence as he shifted gears back into playboy mode. “But, her loss, my gain. I think you owe me a drink now, Mr Alpha Reporter.”

 

“It’s Ke—”

 

“Kent! You clumsy oaf!” Lex charged forward.

 

Bruce sighed loudly. “Stop interrupting me when I’m talking to people, Luthor.”

 

“Stop?” He turned away from Clark to look at Bruce incredulously. “Did you just give me an order?” He hissed.

 

Bruce’s lip curled. “Why, yes. Yes I did.”

 

A heavy pause filled with the chatter of the party, clinking of glasses, and shrill laughter of drunken socialites.

 

Lex stared at him. Finally he spoke. “You may have fun ordering your little boy toys around Bruce, but I am a real alpha. That is not a game you can play with me. Not anymore.”

 

Bruce’s smile sharpened. “They’re not little, Lex. Trust me.”

 

“That’s enough,” Lex rumbled.

 

Omegas could have strong submissive reactions when hearing the tone of an alpha growl. If Bruce felt any he didn’t show it.

 

“And,” he added drunkenly. “What makes you a ‘real’ alpha? I mean,” Bruce jabbed a thumb towards Clark, “he’s a higher level than you.”

 

Lex’s eyes flashed, still not looking Clark in the eye. “You don’t know that.”

 

“Actually, I do,” he tapped his nose. “I have a superior sense of smell, or did you forget that little detail? You’re medium but on the low end of that. He’s a strong, safe, mid level alpha.”

 

Clark felt a flicker of a smile dance across his face. “Yes.” Bruce had applied both those descriptive words to him before. Usually when he was dressed in the red and blue of his uniform and in short curt phrases such as ‘you’re a safe choice’ or ‘you’re strong enough to do this’. Never had they felt so strangely personal. Like a secret message he was slipping him; a reminder that under this frivolous mask there burnt a dark intelligence that knew him. Knew him better than any of the other alphas gathered around.

 

That trusted him.

 

“And those two,” Bruce continued shamelessly waving towards the two alphas he’d brought with him. “They’re mids too but, well, at least they _look_ like alphas.”

 

“You think just because you’re a high level with some alpha whores following you around you’re better?” Lex snapped. “You arrogant bitch.”

 

Bruce laughed. “If I recall I was an arrogant bastard before. Now, I’m an arrogant bitch.” He rolled his shoulders in a loose shrug. “It’s not that different. I’m the same as I always was. The only difference is the company.”

 

Lex twitched. “Your parents would be asham—”

 

The punch was far too targeted and far too powerful for the drunken omega Bruce was pretending to be. Clark hurried to his side and quickly dragged him back before he could follow up with a second strike. Around him three other alphas had appeared to snarl at each other in confusion.

 

Bruce shrugged out of his hold and pushed through the newcomers. “Sorry, Lex,” he said, voice dripping with false sincerity, “I slipped.” Lex’s nose was bleeding and cheek already red where the bruise would form.

 

The man looked up.

 

Clark saw it all. He saw Lex’s face contort with rage, saw his arm come up, and even Bruce’s decision to let the blow hit him.

 

Not many people had seen Bruce’s punch. A lot saw Lex’s backhand. The reaction was immediate and instinctual. The alphas closest to Lex surged forward, pushing him violently away as the betas swarmed around the omega; making sure he was okay and angrily backing up the alphas when they established that he was.

 

It was almost ironic. While it wasn’t openly encouraged anymore it was still accepted that an alpha could strike and omega as punishment. But, only a parent, pack member, or mate. The moment an alpha that didn’t fit into those categories lifted his hand against an omega people suddenly were able to see the injustice of the action. What would have been acceptable private behaviour was transformed into something offensive enough to warrant a removal of the offender from the party.

 

“Well,” Bruce said loudly once the man was gone. “That’s the end of my contracts with LexCorp.”

 

The hosts tried to apologise but Bruce waved their words away and returned to the party, apparently unfazed.

 

As the event came to an end he donated an obscene amount of money and walked out of the park, still tailgated by the plastic pair of alphas now looking fleetingly hopeful and nudging each other aside to stand closer to Bruce.

 

Clark approached as his car pulled up and the alphas climbed into the backseat.

 

“Mr Wayne?”

 

Bruce stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Kent,” he acknowledged.

 

The silence seemed to last forever.

 

“I… um… I’m sorry about what happened in there,” he finally managed to say.

 

Bruce’s look didn’t waver. “I’m not.”

 

“I…” he licked his lips. “I never got to ask for an interview.”

 

Bruce’s eyes softened.

 

“If you’re not busy tomorrow I could…” Clark began hopefully.

 

“Maybe,” he interrupted him, “it’ll be a better idea if they send Lane next time.” His voice was painfully soft.

 

Clark’s insides twisted. “Oh… okay.”

 

Bruce turned his back on him, climbed into the backseat with the alpha models, and closed the door. The car pulled away with a low purr.

 

Clark stood there for a long time before he finally willed up the energy to return to the people leaving and wade through a few more drunken interviews. Once done he surrendered the reporter’s badge, grabbed his phone, and walked down the roadside towards the hotel. The other pedestrians gave him a wide berth, street lights glared down upon his passage, and new shoes wore in with ugly squeaks.

 

In that moment he hated Oliver Queen. He hated that the man had somehow managed to wrangle those feeling up from inside him, hated how much more real the vocal admittance had made them, and how little it mattered. Hated himself for wanting it to matter. He was a strong, safe, alpha that Bruce called friend. That should be enough. More than enough. It was selfish to ask for more. That was more than Bruce had given anyone else. A treasure. But one that still paled in comparison to the one he had dreamed Bruce would give him.

 

Clark’s phone rung.

 

He reached into his pocket, checked the caller, and answered it.

 

“Hey Lois.”

 

_“Wow, you sound miserable.”_

 

“I’m okay.”

 

Dryly. _“I’m sure. Did anything interesting happen?”_

 

“Bruce Wayne punched Lex Luthor.”

 

_“I mean, seriously.”_

 

“Seriously.”

 

A pause. _“Seriously?”_

 

Again. “Seriously.”

 

 _“Bloody hell,”_ she said, astonished, _“I would have_ paid _money to see that. The one thing something interesting happens with the whole story and it’s the one time I refused to go.”_ A clatter, crash, and muffled curse as she dropped and retrieved something. _“Anyway, what are you doing now?”_

 

“Heading back to the hotel.”

 

_“Did Perry put you in the one with the scary lady at reception? The one with the eyebrows?”_

 

He made a face. “Yeah.”

 

_“You don’t have to go there if you don’t want to.”_

 

“It’s the only room that’s paid for, Lois.”

 

 _“No,”_ the connection crackled. _“I mean, you could come over here for a bit.”_

 

“What?”

 

_“Get out of gritty grey Gotham and come over. Just if you want. I was just thinking we could…”_

 

“Clark.”

 

He turned around. Bruce’s sleek black car was pulled up behind him, the backdoor open, and the billionaire lounging against the back seat, one foot on the pavement.

 

_“Clark?”_

 

“I-I’ll call you back,” he stammered, hung up, and shoved the phone in his pocket. “Bruce? I didn’t hear you pull up.”

 

“Get in.”

 

“But…”

 

“Now.”

 

He approached timidly and peeked into the backseat. The other two alphas were gone.

 

Bruce slid back across, making room.

 

“Is this an interview?”

 

Low. “Something like that.”

 

He climbed uncertainly in, closed the door, and pulled on his seatbelt. Bruce didn’t. He stayed lounging across the backseat as the car pulled away to move quietly through the city; gaze fixed on Clark.

 

The silence was thick, heavy, and sat on him like a weight; as did Bruce’s scent. In the confined space it enveloped him like an arm slung almost threateningly across his shoulders. Bewitchingly beautiful but also intrinsically dangerous; a siren song threatening to pull him down into the dark at any moment; to destroy him so utterly, so perfectly, it would be like he as Clark Kent – as a single entity - had never existed.

 

When the car moved beyond the glittering skyscrapers he cleared his throat and spoke. “I… about this Lex thing; he put something in…”

 

“I know.”

 

He swallowed. “Okay.”

 

Bruce’s eyes narrowed. “You’re nervous,” he observed.

 

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Clark confessed.

 

“We’ve been friends for years.” He said pointedly, almost angrily. “You never used to be nervous of me.”

 

“You never used to put me in the back of a car heading for the city limits before," he reminded him.

 

Another silence. This one lasted until Bruce leant forward and told the driver to pull over in an empty car park complex. The car wound up a spiral driveway and parked within the lines in a deserted floor of the ugly concrete structure.

 

“Take a walk, Alfred.”

 

“Sir,” the man acknowledged and left.

 

Bruce waited until he was out of sight before turning back towards Clark. This stare was more intense; predatory.

 

“I,” Clark struggled to begin. “Do I interview you now?”

 

“Lie down.”

 

His stomach was a string of knots, palms sweaty, and heart thudding in his ears. “But…”

 

“Now.”

 

His throat tightened further. “Is this… do you want to… are we…?”

 

“Would you object?”

 

He stared at him.

 

“If I wanted to,” Bruce clarified slowly. “Would you say no?”

 

Clark could hardly move, hardly breathe, hardly think. Slowly he shook his head from side to side.

 

Slowly. “Then lie down.”

 

For the first time in his life he didn’t have to pretend to be clumsy. He desperately tried to control his limbs as he shuffled awkwardly down to lie across the fragrant leather seat, left his arms stiff and uncertain at his sides, and legs sprawled wide and undignified to make room for the other man. The moment he was down Bruce was above him, eyes burning with savage hunger, and fingers roughly testing and tugging at Clark’s clothes.

 

“Bruce…”

 

“Don’t talk.”

 

He swallowed and with a shock realised he could taste the alpha hormones in his mouth. He’d never started salivating this quickly before. He liked this. _Liked_ this.

 

All he could see was Bruce’s savage flash of teeth, angry intensity of his glare, and the pulse thudding in his neck. Strong, sure, powerful. Everything society said he shouldn’t be. Beautiful because of it. The difference between a frightened kitten and a prowling panther. And he liked it. Loved it. Was already getting hard for it.

 

Bruce’s hands fisted in his suit jacket and pulled it apart, yanking buttons off their threads and ripping the material. His shirt received the same treatment exposing the Superman logo underneath. Bruce paused to regard this for a moment and reached forward to lay the flat of his hand against the symbol of his house on Krypton.

 

“You wear this all the time.” It wasn’t really a question.

 

Clark nodded, not sure if he was allowed to talk or not.

 

The omega looked down at him, studied him, and reached up to slide the glasses off his face. Finger tips scraped against his skin and through his hair. “You wear your scent all the time too.”

 

Another nod.

 

“You shouldn’t.”

 

He didn’t move. It was answer enough.

 

Bruce grunted and moved to ground his pelvis against Clark’s hip, his own muscular thigh pressing against Clark’s groin hard enough that, if he was human, it would hurt. But he wasn’t human. Bruce knew that. Bruce knew no matter what he did he couldn’t hurt him. So he ground into him with enough force to bruise bone, crushed their bodies together with enough force to _feel_ , and pushed against him harder than any sexual partner had been willing to do before. Sexual partner. Bruce. The concepts crashed together in his brain; fevered, erotic, and perversely alluring. Because that’s what was happening, right? They were sexual partners. They were having sex. _God_ , he was having sex with Bruce.

 

Bruce tearing blindly at Clark’s belt. Bruce already hard against his hip. Bruce pulling open his fly. Bruce biting at his neck. Bruce humping him in the backseat of a car. Bruce heavy and hot on top of him. Bruce swamping him with a scent more mind-bendingly alluring than any omega he’d ever met. Bruce finding the base of his cock – right where a knot would form – and squeezing hard enough that Clark moaned aloud. Bruce looking at him and moving with all the aggression of an alpha yet with fluidity and finesse they lacked.

 

Bruce.

 

His hands were on him before he knew he planned on putting them there; feeling the firm shape of the body hidden beneath the deceptive cut of his designer clothes. Muscular arms, broad shoulders, washboard stomach, and… Clark blinked… _oh_ … an arse. Not overly large and still made up of more hardened muscle mass than anything else, but defiantly more pronounced than the arse one would typically find on an alpha or a beta and hanging off broader hips.

 

Clark’s cock twitched.

 

He tugged open Bruce’s belt and slid his hands inside his pants to feel that arse. Feel the firm flesh bare against his fingers. Bruce twitched and his eyes flashed.

 

“Clark.” Spoken like a warning.

 

He paused. Bruce watched him; waiting with dark eyed intensity to see what he would do next. A test.

 

He hesitated before reaching deeper into his pants; fisting flesh and grazing his fingertips against the other man’s entrance. It was the wrong move. Bruce shuddered violently, hissed though gritted teeth, and glared at him with eyes cold enough to burn.

 

His hands left Clark’s cock to grab his wrists and pull him roughly off him. “Don’t touch me there,” he snarled.

 

“I-I’m sorry.”

 

Furiously. “I told you not to talk.”

 

“I know, but…”

 

Bruce pinned his hands above his head. “Don’t move them.”

 

Clark nodded. “Okay, it’s okay.” His fingers curled to dig into the leather armrest built into the door. “We don’t have to do that.”

 

Bruce ignored him.

 

“Or you could top me.”

 

The omega looked up, stunned. “What?”

 

“Only if you’re into it,” he said quickly.

 

“You would let _me_ top _you_?”

 

Omega males topping alphas was a kink and not one a lot of people shared. “I… I shouldn’t have said… only if you wanted to. It’s…”

 

“But you would, let me?” The other man pressed.

 

He bit his bottom lip and nodded.

 

A pause. “Fine,” Bruce said.

 

Clark’s throat tightened even further. “Fine?” He rasped.

 

“Okay,” the omega said instead.

 

Breathlessly. “Okay?”

 

“Okay.”

 

Bruce leant back, pulled Clark’s belt from his hips with a snap of aged leather, and began dragging his pants down.

 

Clark bit his bottom lip, gripped the armrest, and arched off the seat to let the other man get the material below his thighs.

 

He didn’t know what impossible sequence of events had led him to this situation. He didn’t know how the universe had so quickly and so utterly turned on its head or how long it would last. All he knew was he was here, Bruce was here, and he was more turned on than he had ever been in his entire life.

 

Bruce grabbed him by the back of the knees, folded him, and reached up to unapologetically push his first two fingers into Clark’s mouth; gathering the excess of alpha saliva and putting it to use working him open.

 

By the time he entered him Clark was bucking hopelessly up into the still almost fully clothed man; his body thrumming with sensation, and mind a blitz of nothing but _Bruce Bruce Bruce_.

 

He was bent in two for him, clenching around the long curve of his cock, and crying out with every thrust. And it was perfect.

 

Bruce fucked him with an abusive snap of hips, Clark’s legs over his shoulders, and gaze snaking between his face and the exposed crest on his chest.

 

He was breathing, groaning, and desperately swallowing the saliva still filling his mouth. He saw Bruce notice; his eyes fix onto his lips like an eagle spotting a field mouse. He lurched forward, their bodies coming together for the first time, and kissed him. Hungry, open; feeding off the hormones in his mouth. The kiss he had denied Bruce when they were in heat. The kiss that had haunted him for weeks. Their first kiss.

 

Clark came, cock hardly touched, crushed between their bodies; ruining Bruce’s silk shirt in seconds and knotting the air like a teenager.

 

“Ah…” he broke their lips apart. “God… I’m sorry I…”

 

Bruce growled and crushed their mouths together again. Wild, savage, perfect.

 

When Bruce came Clark felt it; felt every beautiful part of it. He felt him shiver, felt his groan smothered between this kiss, and felt the hot splash of semen pour out inside him with one last frantic thrust.

 

Then it was over as suddenly as it began. Bruce collapsed against him, just breathing, and Clark slowly, carefully, pulled them apart and lowered his legs. When Bruce didn’t protest he let go of the ruined armrest to slowly, uncertainly, wrap his arms around him. They didn’t move; gradually recovering as they drifted in the rousing aroma of their mingled scents. Sweet and arid. Opposite but somehow undeniably complementary.

 

What could have been moments or hours later Bruce sat up, looked at him, and swore.

 

“Hey, are you… was it alright?”

 

Bruce pulled off him, took note of the state of his shirt for the first time, and pulled it off over his head.

 

Clark caught his breath. It wasn’t the trim shape of his body, the bulk of muscle, or the undeniably masculine shape of his chest that stopped him. It was the scars. In the dim light spilling from the street lamps they shone silver; some small and secretive but some hard, heavy, and deep enough to deform the muscle beneath.

 

Bruce caught him looking, grimaced, and looked aside. “Give me your shirt.”

 

Numbly he obeyed; tugged off his jacket and passed the ripped blue cotton towards him. Bruce wrenched it on, not meeting his eyes, and used the remaining buttons to close the front.

 

“I didn’t know you had so many,” Clark tried lamely.

 

Bitterly. “It’s the price we mortals pay.”

 

He reached out and touched one before the man could hide it. A soft stroke of fingertip.

 

Bruce paused and looked at him.

 

“You know I’m grateful for it. For all you’ve done.”

 

The omega looked aside and swore.

 

“Bruce?”

 

“Get out.”

 

He withdrew his hand. “Did I do something wrong?”

 

“No.”

 

“I…”

 

“Go.”

 

He hesitated a moment longer before tentatively pulling him up pants; stuffing his still erect shaft and knot behind the fly. Bruce reached forward to help him, knuckles grazing against the bulge at his base as he zipped him up.

 

“Thanks.”

 

He didn’t respond and watched as Clark climbed over the twisted armrest and tumbled out the door.

 

As he left the car park, still clutching at his clothing, he walked by Alfred leaning against one of the concrete pillars.

 

He froze when he saw the man looking at him. “Um… Hi.”

 

“Mr Kent,” he acknowledged.

 

Clark’s jacket was still in his hands, belt slung over one shoulder, and glasses hanging from the front of his exposed Superman shirt. He knew his knot would be visible straining against his fly and could feel Bruce’s come leaking out of him; warm, sticky, and no doubt staining his underpants.

 

“I’m going to go back to my hotel now.”

 

The man inclined his head in a brief nod.

 

“I… um… sorry for…” he was blushing furiously. “You know.”

 

Calmly. “Goodnight, Mr Kent.”

 

“Goodnight.” He hugged his clothes to his chest and took off, not bothering to shed the last of Clark Kent’s aging formal wear.

 

Later, unable to sleep, he flew to Mercury and stared up at the sun. In her loving life giving gaze he allowed himself to reach out and grasp the tiny tendril of hope that had flowered from the deep roots their relationship had sunk into him years before.

 

“God, I hope…” he couldn’t finish that sentence so he let it hang; let it exist as an unfinished whisper in the depth of space.

 

_“I hope.”_


	18. Chapter 18

“Hey.”

 

Bruce looked up.

 

Barbara stepped down the stairs into the body of the cave, hair bundled behind her head, and slim jumper hugged around her shoulders. For a moment she looked like she had when she was sixteen; tall, narrow, and still not quite sure of her beauty. The stubborn girl in a leather jacket and bright yellow work boots that told him she would be Batgirl with him or without.

 

“What do you need?”

 

“I came to see Dick but Alfred told me he went back to Bludhaven to sort out all the police stuff.”

 

“He left this morning.”

 

A small frown. “You know they’re going to fire him.” She came to rest up against his workbench. “They’ll keep him around for a few months, maybe even a while longer, but no one wants a millionaire hanging around. Not really. It’s like trying to be friends with your boss. Under it all there is the secret understanding that they’re different than you.”

 

He took the sample he was looking at out of the microscope and slipped a new one in.

 

“So,” she began again. “Want to talk about it?”

 

“I’m checking the difference between…”

 

“I mean, Superman.”

 

A long pause. “Alfred told you.”

 

“Actually it was Dick,” she waved her phone towards him.

 

He sighed. “Alfred told Dick,” he concluded.

 

“I know,” she held up her hands, “we betas are gossip whores, but in all seriousness, this is kind of a big deal so you can’t blame us for getting interested. You haven’t let an alpha near you since, well, ever.”

 

He didn’t say anything.

 

She rubbed her brow. “Fine, what are you looking at?”

 

“Computer. Image file four two seven one.” The screen behind the desk lit up and a security cam still flickered into focus. “I think this is who has been attacking Black Mask.”

 

She fished her glasses out of her pocket, put them on, and frowned. “Who’s that?”

 

“They’re calling him Red Hood.”

 

Her lips thinned. “Another one.”

 

“It would seem so.”

 

She turned back towards him. “Any idea who he is?”

 

“Not yet.”

 

“Mayor player?” She pushed.

 

“No. Not yet.”

 

“Not yet?”

 

“Not yet,” he confirmed.

 

Another extended silence.

 

“Is it serious?” She asked. “Superman?”

 

He thought about Clark gazing up at him as if he was the most fascinating thing on the face of the planet, the indestructible hands holding him with raw unrefined reverence, and the way he had opened for him; his mouth, his arms, and his body.

 

“No,” he answered.

 

“You paused,” Barbara observed quietly.

 

“I did.”

 

“Is that ‘no’ subject to change?”

 

He thought of the strange strong feel of Clark around him, of the sight of Superman lying back and submitting to him despite possessing all the power and authority his sexual caste afforded him, and the taste of his lips; a single minded alpha flavour that was bold, brazen, and clenched hot and wet between his legs.

 

“No.”

 

“You paused again.”

 

He hadn’t intended to have sex when he arrived at the charity ball. He had planned to make a scene, throw away some of his recently won money, and hope that satisfied the curiosity of the gossip media for another month. He hadn’t planned on seeing the other man there; looking at him with eyes made insipid by the tint in his glasses, body bulky under the aged suit, and yet still strangely, undeniably, beautiful. Beautiful not just because of the shape of his jaw, lips, or forgiving line of his eyebrows but because he was an alpha that’s scent had come to mean the definition of strength and assurance. An alpha that had walked away from him in heat, had bitten him and asked for nothing, and was knocking a drugged drink from his hands.

 

Alphas weren’t like Clark. He knew that. He had learnt the hard way that alphas weren’t good, or honest, or safe. Not when it came to sex. Not when it came to him. Alphas weren’t good for him. The stronger they were the more dangerous they were. The closer he got to them the more civility washed off. There had only been a few exceptions and those had lost interest in him when they learnt he would never kneel.

 

But Clark was different. He couldn’t be but he was.

 

He was too good. Too perfect. He wouldn’t to try and bite him, try to take him, try to own him. He wouldn’t treat him like property if he saw him naked.

 

But that’s what he thought about Talia as well. Talia who had drugged him to try and get him on his knees.

 

He needed to push Clark away. He tried to. But then he was in the car with two alpha supermodels quietly vying among themselves as to which got to claim him for the night. He’d run his hand through his hair, swallowed the first mouthful of alcohol he had all night, and ordered them out on the next corner.

 

He couldn’t believe Clark was like the others. He wasn’t. But they were all like the others. They were all the same. He needed to test. To see, as Selina had suggested, if he was something real, something possible, or just something forgettable, regrettable, that he could fuck out of his system.

 

If he was honest he had still in however small a way been trying to scare Clark away. Trying to hurt, humiliate him even, but Clark not only had lain down for him but been the one to suggest he top him; take it further than even he had been intending to.

 

He knew alphas could be submissive. He knew that. But he had never really experienced it before. Never really come across an alpha that seemed to enjoy being manhandled, bitten, and used. At least, not by an omega and not in the way Clark seemed to. Raw, frantic, and perfectly desperate.

 

And nothing _nothing_ had ever given him the raw sexual _tug_ that fucking into a body while looking down to see the Superman’s crest emblazed across his crest had done. That sight had done things to him. Made his cock ache with need, made his insides clench painfully tight, and made him wet without even a touch. This was the most powerful alpha – potentially the most powerful being – on the planet and he was lying down for him, moaning for him, and coming for him with nothing more than a kiss.

 

Beyond that… it was Clark. Blue eyes, crooked smile, the damnable frustrating bastard that had been sneaking into his life for years. Clark.

 

Now, for the first time, something sexual on top of everything else he already was.

 

He wasn’t meant to pass the test. He had.

 

“Okay,” Barbara interrupted. “That’s a _really_ long pause.”

 

He hadn’t even worn a condom. It didn’t matter. Not with Clark. There was no human disease that could affect that man. But the fact that had hadn’t even _thought_ to wear one. All he’d thought was… Clark. The smell of him, the feel of him, the taste of him…

 

“Bruce?”

 

“I don’t know,” he muttered.

 

She sighed. “That’s what I was worried about.”

 

He rubbed his face in his hands,

 

“You’re over this legal stuff,” Barbara continued, “and are moving onto your next big issue which means I no longer have an excuse to hang around.”

 

He frowned. “You don’t need an excuse.”

 

“I’m not pack.”

 

“Yet.”

 

She ran her fingers through her hair, knocking it out of its bundle at the back of her skull. “I have a pack, Bruce. I… I’m kind of a co-leader.”

 

He didn’t move. “Then why aren’t you with them?”

 

“I…” she made a face, “this is going to sound really stupid but when I was in the chair I was a leader but behind the lines. Now, I’m meant to be fighting with them and I don’t know if I’m… as good as I used to be.”

 

“You’re not.”

 

Her brow creased.

 

“You’re better.”

 

“No,” she took a deep breath. “I’m not. I… I lost it a bit when I saw what the Joker did to those kids. I acted stupidly and that… I can’t do that. I’ve been here trying to figure out who I used to be and how to get back there.”

 

“Don’t try to be who you used to be, and don’t try to figure it out alone. You have a pack. Work with them; figure out who you are now. If you’re not Batgirl anymore, if you want to stay Oracle...”

 

“No,” she shook her head. “No, I was strong as Oracle but Batgirl means freedom. I’m not staying behind the lines anymore.”

 

“Then don’t.”

 

She stared at him. “I don’t think… It’s not that simple.”

 

He waited.

 

“You’re right,” she said with a heavy sigh. “You’re always right about this kind of thing, you bastard.”

 

He studied her. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

 

“I need to get back to them. I’ve spent so much time here I can feel my pack bonds starting to starve. I’m just not sure I’m ready.”

 

He didn’t say anything. If they, whoever they were, were true pack they wouldn’t need her to be ‘ready’ to return to them. Pack bonds weren’t as strong as mate bonds but, if anything, they were more final. Once someone had dedicated themselves to someone in the pack, once their bodies recognised the pheromones of the other pack members, and they let themselves lapse instinctually towards pack behaviour, they were pack. That wasn’t easily changed. When Dick, Alfred, and he were together he still felt the gap where Jason used to be; his body reaching out for the scent that wasn’t there. It had been almost five years before he stopped trying to smell his parents in the same way whenever he was with Alfred; the only other survivor of his father’s pack.

 

“You’ll be alright alone?”

 

“I’m not alone.”

 

“I mean, on patrol.” She specified. “Dick back in Bludhaven and me following the Birds of Prey around?”

 

He scowled. “I survived before you two arrived.”

 

Her lip curved. “Barely.”

 

He glared at her.

 

Barbara laughed softly and leant forward to press a soft kiss onto his forehead. “Take care of yourself, Bruce.”

 

Her beta scent was warm, friendly, and undeniably feminine; a perfume all its own and subtle enough not be as intrusive as his own. He would miss being a beta, being able to wear such an easy scent, but he had proven last night he didn’t need it. He could protect his family, Dick, Alfred and even Barbara, from the persecution of the cowl while still holding onto his freedom.

 

He had first worn the beta mask to retain liberties he would otherwise be denied; not just his inheritance but the right to be looked upon as something other than a trophy, a prize to be fought over and claimed. He had donned the playboy persona to shift suspicion off him in regard to Batman. As an omega he didn’t need to Bruce Wayne, media darling, anymore. No one would suspect Batman was an omega. But with it he could stay free. The eccentric billionaire that punched Lex Luthor and got away with it.

 

It was a combination he wouldn’t have expected to work so well, but it had.

 

The only thing that hadn’t fallen into place was Clark.

 

As if reading his thoughts she spoke. “And don’t be too hard on Superman, he seems alright.”

 

Reluctantly. “He does.”

 

She left later that night and for the first time in well over a month it was just him and Alfred again. But it was better. Before his last heat things had been strained; Dick’s distance had been slowly pulling his pack apart at the seams, as had his own more exclusively emotional distance. Somehow, amid the disastrous string of events that had followed the raid, they had repaired damage he hadn’t even realised was there. Bridged rifts he hadn’t even noticed were forming. For the first time since Jason died his pack felt like something real, something good, and something – while perhaps not whole – worth fighting for.

 

Life returned to a strange kind of normality; everything slightly different but still also familiar. He was still Batman, still a billionaire playboy, and still part of the Justice League. But now he was also a known omega. It wasn’t disastrous if his scent mask broke a little while working late on repairs in the Watchtower – though the amount of coffee and snacks he received during such times set his teeth on edge – and he was forcibly removed from the call list during the days he was scheduled to go into heat. Bruce Wayne dated alphas, never the same ones twice, and rapidly rebuilt his reputation for being a sex orientated airhead. That, added to his sexual caste, kept the occasional Batman investigator further from his door than they had ever been before. The only thing truly out of place was Clark.

 

The man fascinated him.

 

An alpha that defied all norms, bore an unearthly, alien, beauty, and was still so safe and familiar to be called his friend.

 

He hadn’t meant to have sex with him again. When it happened; against the wall of the Watchtower, fully clothed, coming into each other’s fists; he rationalised it was just a control to re-establish the results of their previous encounter. The third and fourth times weren’t as easy to explain. The fifth time Clark sucked him off for the first time. It stopped being about trying to push him away, stopped being about trying to embarrass or humiliate him, and started becoming about them… just them. Alpha and omega, armed with unexpected sexualities, revealing in what they were.

 

But then he had told Clark he was going into heat when the man asked if he wanted to come to dinner with Diana and Clark’s fleetingly hopeful – hungry – look had shorn through the budding faith he had held in him.

 

“That is not an invitation!”

 

“I’m sorry… I… I didn’t mean…”

 

He didn’t know if their strange affair would have continued after that if the man hadn’t shown up at the batcave a week later, apologised, and knelt. It was an action he performed almost without thinking; an adherence to social instinct Bruce hadn’t seen in the other man before. Normally an omega knelt to show their submission to a sexual partner. Kneeling was also a more public form of submission – not explicitly sexual like presenting – but humiliating; something only done when one was truly submitting to a wrongdoing. Clark used it as a combination of both; acting out the omega’s role in a sexual relationship and also silently apologising in a way above and beyond his offence.

 

It was the first time they had sex without clothes. And the first time he stimulated himself anally via the other man.

 

They did it in the dark, Clark obediently unmoving beneath him, as Bruce humped back against his thigh. His orgasm was almost painful, a choked back cry that hit him like an attack as he grazed his entrance against unforgiving flesh. He didn’t do that again for a while. It made his insides ache and entrance clench around the gaping wet _lack_ inside him. It made him want to be penetrated. And he wasn’t ready for that.

 

Not quite yet.

 

He needed to… research first.

 

He found out everything he could about Kryptonian biology and restudied what he already did know. Relevantly, they could mate, form mate bonds, and even impregnate humans. On top of that he already knew the alien could read his pheromones, knot, and bite. Clark had everything the human alpha had; could do everything to him they could. There was no reason for his deviation from the norm; nothing other than him.

 

It didn’t make sense. _He_ didn’t make sense. But, for the first time, Bruce didn’t care. As the months moved by, as their relationship slowly changed more and more into a sexual one, he let the mystery unveil itself. Let them explore and discover who and what they were, share themselves and their experience, and bring each other pleasure. A simple reliving of need. They didn’t see each other that often, in fact they spent less time together than they used to, but it was enough.

 

A safe, simple, share of the kind he hadn’t been able to do in a long time.


	19. Chapter 19

Bruce could feel Clark’s cock. A blunt presence pressed against his entrance; hard wet, and unmistakable through the sodden martial of their underpants.

 

He could reach down, Bruce realised. He could reach down, pull aside the soaked fabric of their underwear, and in that instant they would be fucking. Clark was hard enough, he was wet enough, they were already doing the motions; there wouldn’t be anything else to the process. It would be so easy, so simple, and then Clark would be in him and… that would be it. Clark would be _in_ him for the first time.

 

No drama, no talking, just… alpha and omega.

 

Clark was grinding against him harder now, his cock pushing between the cleft of his arse and pressing hard against his entrance; an insistent presence that grazed against his opening and sent stray shocks of pleasure coursing through his body. His insides clenched desperately around the emptiness inside him; the near painful lack that was becoming more and more prevalent the more the other man stimulated him, the more his scent flowed around him, and the more he pressed against him; burning body heat, hard muscle, and _mate_. Alpha, mate, cock, knot, heavy, hot, hearty, strong, safe… _Clark_.

 

Clark rutting against him, Clark clutching at his body, Clark kissing the side of his face with scorching wet lips that smelt of nothing but _alpha_. That, when he caught them, tasted of nothing else. Except Clark. His own unique, alien, twist on the saliva born hormones as deliciously addictive as the man himself.

 

He was bucking back against him before he realised what he was doing; ankles hooked behind the alpha’s back, spine arching off the mattress, and tongue penetrating his mouth – in out in out in out – like he was fucking that delicious wet cavern. The other man groaned in response, clutched at his thighs, and ground against him harder; urgently crushing his cloth encased cock against the damp patch on Bruce’s underpants; abused and bunched into the wet crevice of his arse.

 

 _God._ He was humping him so fast and hard it was a miracle he _wasn’t_ fucking him. Fucking him through the flimsy pieces of clothing; cock as unyielding as his flesh and pre come leaving him as saturated as Bruce was. So hot, so _wet_ , and so hard their bodies made lewd smacking sounds when they come together. But they weren’t… it wasn’t quite enough… it wasn’t…

 

Bruce broke their kiss with a strangled cry as a surge of need coursed through him; throbbing deep inside him, bringing a new flush of slick between their legs, and sending even more blood into his aching cock. The other man peppered kissed onto his cheeks, chin, nose, mouth, forehead, and anywhere else he could reach. Wet frantic kisses that fell randomly onto him like drops of rain. Pleasent… until one landed on his neck. Bruce’s hand rose like a snake, fingers threading into and gripped Clark’s hair. He yanked the other man’s head violently back from his throat until he was arched, neck barred; assuming a submissive posture even as he lay on top of him.

 

Voice rough. “Not there.”

 

“Sorry,” Clark croaked back, hips stilling. “I wasn’t going to… I just wanted to kiss you…” he swallowed, alpha salvia shimmering on his lips, “sorry.”

 

Bruce pulled his head forward and reconnected their lips. A scrape of teeth, tongue, and lip. Hungry, open, and full of that intoxicating alpha hormone that made his insides clench desperately.

 

Clark resumed their grind. Fast, frantic, and… _fuck._

 

Soon Bruce was humming into their connected lips; muffled groans of denial; desperate and unsatisfied.

 

Clark drew back and looked at him with eyes the colour of a glacier. Bruce saw the question begin to form on the other man’s lips. Saw the hungry, almost agonised, set to the alpha’s features as he began to speak. To ask for the chance to remove the pieces of cloth between them. _Can I?_

 

As he did so Clark’s cock grazed hard against his entrance and he bucked forward with a strangled sound. “Enough! That’s… ah! Get off!”

 

Clark was gone in an instant. The cool air was painful against his straining wet member and the soaking material shoved deep between his legs.

 

Bruce sat up, shaking, and feeling teased to a fraught and frayed edge. Used. He was letting Clark mount him, thrust against him, and hold him like an alpha held an omega. Clark wouldn’t think less of him if he did behave like an omega, Bruce knew. The man had proven himself time and time again both inside the bedroom and out. But still the wretched feeling threatened to return; the twisted part of him that told him acting like this was acting like an object; a possession.

 

He shouldn’t… he wanted to… it was pathetic… it was good…

 

Clark took one look at him, read something in his eyes, and knelt. He fell first to one knee, then the other, folded his hands behind his back, and threw his head back; exposing his jugular.

 

He knew Bruce needed this sometimes; knew it was easier for Bruce to trust him if he was willing to show him he was in charge; that he could control anything and everything they did. He knew it helped him and so he didn’t hesitate. He didn’t seem to care if society said he shouldn’t or if it was a method to humiliate people in a pack. He did it for him; to make him feel strong, safe, and secure in a sexual situation. In command.

 

Bruce knew that’s what he was doing. Knew it was just a method of soothing him.

 

But that didn’t stop it from working.

 

The most powerful alpha on his knees; hair dishevelled, shaking slightly with every ragged breath, and cock tenting the front of his underwear; large, fat, and so wet with slick and pre come he could see the engorged length through the thin white material.

 

“Fuck…” Bruce rasped, eyes trekking up the parallel panels of golden muscle, fixing for a moment on the glittering moist lips, and then sinking to take one more look at the huge cock straining against his pants. All of it presented before him to take and use as he willed.

 

He was shaking. Shaking just as much as Clark; pulse pounding in his neck, balls so heavy they hurt, and insides throbbing urgently – angrily – around the emptiness inside him. Clark tended to do this to him; arouse him with an intensity that contrasted sharply with but complemented his strange submissive sexuality. In the last few months he had seemed to seduce him without even meaning to; wet lips flashing in a friendly smile among the reporters, smouldering alien blue eyes appearing around the corner of his glasses during an interview, and body uncanny in its simple symmetry once Bruce finally tore off those bulky brown suits.

 

Bruce sat in his own slick, ignoring his straining cock, until he could take in a breath and release it without a hitch or a scrape. Once he was in control again he spoke.

 

“Clark.”

 

The man slowly lowered his head to look at him.

 

His gut twisted as he saw the look on his face. Clark didn’t look like he would have expected; not angry or dejected or even frantic with desire, but strangely… loving.

 

He looked away sharply.

 

“When was your last alpha?” Clark said softly.

 

Bruce contemplated not answering, entertained the idea of joking or lying, then… slowly, stiffly. “Six years.”

 

A long pause. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

 

Angrily. “I know.”

 

Clark didn’t say anything. Didn’t move.

 

The man visited Gotham more now. He was more likely to track criminals into the city and as a reporter followed the stories that took him here. Usually Bruce ignored the intrusion into his territory. Let the man flash his hearty scent from the edge of the rooftop or behind the bouncer’s rope, if he was in the mood, commander him for fifteen frantic minutes in a bathroom stall or the batmobile. It was a small strange game of cat and mouse played out on the margins of their lives. A brief moment of shared pleasure. Sometimes, just sometimes, he would up the stakes and hunt the man all the way back to his hotel room.

 

Like tonight.

 

Bruce turned back to face him. Slowly, he reached between his legs, and peeled back the front of his underwear. His cock sprung free; hard, wet, and lined with veins.

 

It was the safer road and, now that he’d thrown Clark off the other, he felt more confident redirecting him down this one. Something they had done before. Something easier.

 

The man moved forward with a blur of super speed, appeared still knelling between Bruce’s knees, and licked greedily at his shaft.

 

He grunted; giving permission.

 

Clark took him into his mouth without hesitation; mindlessly disregarding how taboo it was for an alpha to do this to an omega. As beautifully uncaring as he always was; his mere presence a liberation.

 

Clark’s lips were a hot wet presence; tongue stroked his underside, and throat worked around his head. Hard, fast, and filthy… the way he knew Bruce liked it.

 

As hard as he was he knew he wouldn’t last long. Especially not looking down at the exquisite creature on his knees, hands folded behind him, effortlessly deep throating him like it was the sole purpose of his existence; like it was his God given job.

 

His orgasm was almost painful. His aching balls rapidly emptied and cock driven forward to assault the back of Clark’s indestructible throat. He swallowed.

 

“God, you’re so fucking good,” Bruce rasped.

 

The man let his cock fall out of his mouth and pulled his lips into a lopsided, grin.

 

Bruce hooked his fingers into his underwear and dragged off the sodden clothing. Clark helped him pull it down his knees and tossed it aside.

 

Hopefully. “Do you want…?”

 

Bruce nodded, fell back on the bed, and without a word pulled his knees to his chest. It had taken months for him to feel confident enough in their coupling to let Clark stimulate him anally. At first he had just ridden Clark’s thigh, stomach, or hip. After a while he let Clark touch him but not penetrate. That rule had quickly lapsed under the keen attention Clark would show him. After that the man had jumped at the chance to introduce something else.

 

Clark seized Bruce’s hips and dragged him forward so he could press his mouth against the slick wet opening between his legs.

 

The wave of pleasure that hit him was brutal; like an attack. Clark tasted him, tongued him, and held his thighs as Bruce writhed under the fierce treatment.

 

“F-fuck!”

 

A starved groan. Hot breath blistering against his aching entrance. “You have no idea what you taste like to me.”

 

“Fuck that…”

 

“So damn beautiful…”

 

“Come on!”

 

Clark obeyed.

 

He rimmed him; lapped up the slick trickling out of him, tongued the tight pucker of muscle, and – when Bruce bucked his hips forward – penetrated him to press the point of his tongue into the hot quivering flesh just inside him; the part of him designed to take an alpha’s knot.

 

A lance of raw pleasure surged up his spine. “C-Clark!”

 

The man didn’t relent. Swiped his tongue around the clench of muscle, teased the sensitive skin around it, and plunged forward again to push his tongue in and gulp greedily at the hot slick sure to be smearing over his face.

 

Another shock of pleasure; this one arching his spine off the mattress and running all the way to the ends of his fingers like an electrical current.

 

Clark drew back. “Are you…?”

 

Bruce bucked forward, grabbed his hair, and pulled him back against him. “Don’t fucking stop.”

 

Anal orgasms were always more intense than penile ones. A kind of climax that he felt through his entire body; that throbbed deep inside him, left his mouth dry, and came in debilitating waves of all consuming, intoxicating, weakness. He felt it build with each flicker and thrust of the other man’s tongue; felt himself clench desperately around the alien’s intrusive presence, and felt his orgasm mount; balanced right on that tipping point… and then Clark _vibrated_.

 

Bruce cried out, insides throbbed painfully, and thighs clamped down around the alpha’s head.

 

Clark watched with unguarded fascination and when he was finished climbed up onto the bed beside him; chin wet with slick, semen, and the rich alpha saliva; the inviting earthy scent detectable on every exhale.

 

Bruce reached out, clumsily pulled aside the front of his straining underwear, and started lazily fisting the other man’s cock.

 

Clark shivered, smiled, and there was that look again; loving.

 

He looked down. He couldn’t encourage that. Couldn’t have Clark thinking their relationship – or whatever it was they shared – was in the same vein as that he had with other people. They weren’t testing each other out as possible life partners, they weren’t romancing each other; they were fucking. Exploring their alpha omega dynamic and revealing in the unlikely lock of their mismatched sexualities.

 

That was it.

 

A simple, sexual, expression of what they were amid the bounds of their long lasting friendship. Nothing more.

 

“Perhaps,” Bruce muttered, “it would be better with the lights off.”

 

Clark paused. Smile slipped. “Why?”

 

He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.

 

The alien looked aside. “Okay.”

 

A blur of movement and then the room was plunged into darkness. Bruce felt the bed shift under him as Clark returned to position and after some groping found the man’s cock again.

 

It was easier this way. Simpler. Safer.

 

No eye contact should equate to emotional distance. He didn’t want to hurt Clark; he didn’t want to give him the wrong impression or lead him on. He didn’t want to destroy their friendship over this.

 

“Bruce…?”

 

He grunted.

 

A ragged breath. “I… I still need that interview…”

 

“What interview?”

 

“The shipping contracts.”

 

“Later.”

 

“I can come by next week?” This was his pattern. They would always fuck and he would try and arrange another reason to return to Gotham; the next opportunity they would have to play this game.

 

Simply. “I’m in heat next week.”

 

“But, the Justice League has the UN thing on next week.”

 

“And?”

 

“Nothing,” he shifted within Bruce’s palm. “I’ll tell them you can’t come.”

 

Quickly. “Don’t tell them I’m in heat.”

 

“The Watchtower has your cycle on its database now, you know. Plus we all got a pretty good idea when your heat happens when that raid hit the headlines. They’ll figure it out if I tell them or not.”

 

Again. “Don’t tell them I’m in heat.”

 

“Okay.” A pause. “I’ll tell them you’re fighting giant alien robots or something.”

 

“Giant alien robots?”

 

A low laugh. “You don’t get them as much in Gotham, do you? I could say murderers but it sounds less urgent.”

 

“Giant alien robots are fine.”

 

He rocked into his fist. “Giant alien robots it is.”

 

They lay for a while and Bruce listened to Clark’s breathing. It slowly sped up as he slid his hand up and down the alpha’s length and finally began to break down. But he didn’t groan. He wouldn’t if he was just fisted to his climax. Clark needed more to make the more interesting sounds Bruce had managed to win from him.

 

With an irritated growl he released him and sat up.

 

“Bruce? What are you…?”

 

He turned, swung a leg over the other man, and straddled him.

 

Huskier this time. “God, Bruce…”

 

Their balls pressed together, cocks slid against each other, and skin grated on skin.

 

“Hey,” Clark’s hands found his hips. “Tell me what’s okay, okay?”

 

He rocked forward, sliding their now naked members against each other, and ran his entrance against the underside of Clark cock.

 

“What are you going to do, Kent?”

 

“I’ll… ah… I’ll do anything you want. Just tell me what you want.”

 

He paused and processed this information. “Kiss?” He tried.

 

Clark sat up, holding Bruce on his lap in a strangely forceful gesture, and pulled their bodies together. His lips tasted like sex. Perverse, primal, and utterly perfect. Soon they were pressed together like two pieces of a puzzle, arms entangled, and tongues lost in each others mouths.

 

He shifted forward, pulled his legs up higher…

 

Clark broke the kiss. “A-are you sure?”

 

Yes. No. Yes.

 

“Fuck,” he gave the instruction. “Fuck me.”

 

Their lips reconnected and Clark pulled his hips forward; pulled him into alignment.

 

For the second time that night Bruce felt the head of Clark’s cock press against his entrance. But this time they were both naked. Bare skin on bare skin. Flesh on flesh. Sex on sex.

 

Clark pulled him down; slowly, carefully, positioning him onto the engorged head of his cock. The blunt invasion pressed against him, harder, firmer, until he pushed passed the pucker of muscle. Bruce felt himself stretch; felt his insides clench warm, wet, and welcoming around the other man’s shaft; and felt the pressure as he was slowly, deliberately, forced opened.

 

It hurt. But it also felt… utterly necessary. In that moment, as Clark’s cock pushed by the sheltered nerve endings inside him, he wondered why he had held back from this. How he could have lived his entire life without knowing what it was like to be penetrated by Clark Kent? A fresh wave of heated blood race through his body, restarted the urgent throb inside him, and sent shocks of pleasure as his opening was pulled apart around the other man’s girth. With a groan he felt his body shift to accommodate him; felt his insides open, felt the extra wash of slick, and the movement of muscles guiding the alpha in deeper, through the correct channels, and… _there_. That was as deeply as he had ever been penetrated before. As deep as an alpha female would reach. But Clark was a male – a well endowed male – and so he sheathed himself in deeper.

 

He broke their kiss with a strangled cry.

 

Clark stopped. “Okay?”

 

He nodded, knowing Clark could see in the dark, and sunk his teeth into the other man’s neck.

 

Further, deeper… his body shook. _More._ The prospect was both terrifying and thrilling. Painful and pleasurable. Stimulating and savagely satisfying. _More._

 

Clark slid home, their bodies smacking together, and Bruce pulled away from the man’s neck to cry out in broken, agonised, pleasure.

 

Clark gave him a moment to adjust. A practice he had picked up from sleeping with betas. Bruce didn’t need it. His body was already wet and ready around the other man; clenching around and memorising the shape and feel of him. Linking that up to the musky, earthy, flavour of his kiss and the friendly, forward, presence of his scent.

 

With a needy groan he began to ride him.

 

It didn’t last long. Clark had been teased and denied for too long to last and the sheer near overwhelming feel of what was happening to him soon had them both humping furiously into each other. Clark reaching part of him he didn’t even know existed, Clark grating against the ring of flesh inside him desperately searching for a knot, Clark fucking him. _Clark_ _._

 

The surges of pleasure sucked out everything he had in debilitating waves of weakness and feed it back to him in raw, unchastened, bliss. Soon he was gasping, groaning, and clutching desperately at the man’s broad shoulders.

 

“K-ah-not? Knot?”

 

He couldn’t respond. Just nod. Yes yes _yes._

 

Clark thrust into him four more times before he came. The alpha filled him with a splash of scorching seed and plugged him in one roll of hip. The wave of pleasure that accompanied the action robbed any strength he had left in his limbs and left him slumped against Clark, shaking, and spraying semen against his stomach without a single other touch.

 

Clark fell back and Bruce landed on top of him, groaning as the knot shifted and fluid sloshed back and forth inside him.

 

Breathlessly. “That was… wow.”

 

He tried to growl. It came out as a deeply satisfied purr.

 

Clark’s knot was a simple soothing presence; hot, hard, and still sending sparks through him. _How could he have forgotten?_ Half an hour later when it began to shrink he began to think about what had just happened. To think about what it meant letting Clark top him and what that changed.

 

Clark must have seen something in his eyes because a hand ghosted down the side of his face. “Hey… don’t regret this, okay?”

 

Hollow. “I don’t,” he said more to himself than the other man. “I can’t. I planned it. I’ve been thinking of it for a while now.”

 

“I know.”

 

A finger against his arm; right over where the new contraceptive implant sat.

 

Bruce frowned. “Stop looking through my skin.”

 

“In my defence, I just check for injuries and happen to find… omega stuff.”

 

His hand bunched into a fist. “I’m not your mate, Clark. Even if I was I can take care of myself.”

 

“I just do it because you usually… No. No, that’s fair. I won’t.”

 

Clark’s cock was softening; his knot shrinking, and what little semen his body hadn’t adsorbed trickled hot and sticky down his leg. Bruce groaned, rolled off the other man, and slumped on the rumbled sheets beside him.

 

“Concerning next week…”

 

“The alien robots,” Clark said.

 

Slowly. “I could use some help with that.”

 

Clark stopped breathing. “W-what?”

 

“I usually last four to five days so I understand that…”

 

“…you’re serious?” Clark rasped. “This isn’t a test or anything is it?”

 

“No.”

 

“No? No you’re not serious or no this isn’t a test?”

 

“This isn’t a test,” he answered.

 

A long pause.

 

“I could… if you’re sure, that is.”

 

“It’s just sex.”

 

“Just sex,” Clark agreed breathlessly.

 

“Alpha and omega.” He muttered. “Just… what we are.”

 

“What we are,” the man echoed.

 

“Nothing more.”

 

“Nothing more.”

 

And then they were kissing and he should object, should push him off, but he didn’t. Told himself it was the taste of his lips; the musky alpha allure as wholly satisfying as a hearty meal and stimulating as a hard workout. Yes. That was it. Hormones. Just… he deepened the kiss and pushed himself against the body beside him… hormones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a really hard one guys: I'm sorry it's late and not that good. I just really needed to write a sex scene from Bruce's perspective. It's something I have been getting into the habit of avoiding or doing minimally. I have no idea why but I struggle whenever I write sex from his POV.
> 
> But, in other news, that's it! I hope you enjoyed this prequel or - if you started here - I hope you've enjoyed the start of this series! It's been a lot of fun to write and I can only hope it's been a lot of fun to read as well. You're feedback has been beyond awesome and thanks so much for your support, advice, readership, and kudos. It means an awful lot and has kept me writing at this beautiful punishing pace.
> 
> For those of you who are return readers I would like to throw out a quick question; how well do you think I joined the seam here between the start of 'In the Dark' and this? Do you understand how they got to where they were in that story? I would love to know how well I did. :D
> 
> P.S a gift from a friend. [Sliver of Light](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2133060) by Blue. Thanks so much for jumping into this sandbox with me.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sliver of Light](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2133060) by [BlueU](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueU/pseuds/BlueU)
  * [Through The Valley](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2134752) by [SticksandBones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SticksandBones/pseuds/SticksandBones)




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